The Blue lagoon: A Romance

by H. de Vere Stacpoole
Introduction to the Project Gutenberg text of H. de Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon:
A Romance

by Edward A. Malone
University of Missouri-Rolla

Born on April 9, 1863, in Kingstown, Ireland, Henry de Vere Stacpoole grew up in a

household dominated by his mother and three older sisters. William C. Stacpoole, a
doctor of divinity from Trinity College and headmaster of Kingstown school, died some
time before his son's eighth birthday, leaving the responsibility of supporting the
family to his Canadian-born wife, Charlotte Augusta Mountjoy Stacpoole. At a young
age, Charlotte had been led out of the Canadian backwoods by her widowed mother
and taken to Ireland, where their relatives lived. This experience had strengthened
her character and prepared her for single parenthood.

Charlotte cared passionately for her children and was perhaps overly protective of her
son. As a child, Henry suffered from severe respiratory problems, misdiagnosed as
chronic bronchitis by his physician, who in the winter of 1871 advised that the boy be
taken to Southern France for his health. With her entire family in tow, Charlotte made
the long journey from Kingstown to London to Paris, where signs of the
Franco-Prussian War were still evident, settling at last in Nice at the Hotel des Iles
Britannique. Nice was like paradise to Henry, who marveled at the city's affluence and
beauty as he played in the warm sun.

After several more excursions to the continent, Stacpoole was sent to Portarlington, a
bleak boarding school more than 100 miles from Kingstown. In contrast to his sisters,
the Portarlington boys were noisy and uncouth. As Stacpoole writes in his
autobiograhy Men and Mice, 1863-1942 (1942), the boys abused him mentally and
physically, making him feel like "a little Arthur in a cage of baboons." One night, he
escaped through an adjacent girls' school and returned to Kingstown, only to be
betrayed by his family and dragged back to school by his eldest sister.

When his family moved to London, he was taken out of Portarlington and enrolled at
Malvern College, a progressive school with refined students and plenty of air and
sunshine. Stacpoole thoroughly enjoyed his new surroundings, which he associated
with the description of Malvern Hills in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
(1857): "Keepers of Piers Plowman's visions / Through the sunshine and the snow."
This environment encouraged his interest in literature and writing.

The idyll ended, however, when Stacpoole began his medical training. At his mother's
prodding, he entered the medical school at St. George's Hospital. Twice a day, he had
to traverse a park frequented by perambulating nursemaids, and he became
romantically involved with one of them. When his mother discovered their affair, she
insisted that he transfer to University College, and he complied.
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More interested in literature than corpses, Stacpoole began to neglect his studies and
miss classes, especially the required dissections. Finally, the dean of the medical
school confronted him, and their argument drove Stacpoole to St. Mary's Hospital,
where he completed his medical training and qualified L. S. A. in 1891. At some point
after this date, Stacpoole made several sea voyages into the tropics (at least once as a
doctor aboard a cable-mending ship), collecting information for future stories.

Stacpoole's literary career, which he once described as being "more like a Malay
fishing prahu than an honest-to-God English literary vessel," began inauspiciously with
the publication of The Intended (1894), a tragic novel about two look-alikes, one rich,
the other poor, who switch places on a whim. Bewildered by the novel's lack of
success, Stacpoole consulted his friendly muse, Pearl Craigie, alias John Oliver
Hobbes, who suggested a comic rather than tragic treatment. Years later, Stacpoole
retold the story in The Man Who Lost Himself (1918), a commercially successful comic
novel about a down-and-out American who impersonates his wealthy look-alike in
England.

Set in France during the Franco-Prussian War, Stacpoole's second novel, Pierrot
(1896), recounts a French boy's eerie relationship with a patricidal doppelganger. Like
its predecessor, it was a commercial failure, and it was at this point, perhaps, that
Stacpoole began to view literary success only in terms of sales figures and numbers of
editions.

A strange tale of reincarnation, cross dressing, and uxoricide, Stacpoole's third novel,
Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897), purports to be the deathbed confession of
Beatrice Sinclair, who is both a reincarnated murderer (male) and a descendant of the
murder victim (female). She falls in love with Gerald Wilder, a man disguised as a
woman, who is both a reincarnated murder victim (female) and the descendant of the
murderer (male). Despite its originality, the novel was killed by "Public Indifference"
(Stacpoole's term), which also killed The Rapin (1899), a novel about an art student in
Paris.

Stacpoole spent the summer of 1898 in Sommerset, where he took over the medical
practice of an ailing country doctor. So peaceful were his days in this pastoral setting
that he had time to write The Doctor (1899), a novel about an old-fashioned physician
practicing medicine in rural England. "It is the best book I have written," Stacpoole
declared more than forty years later. He could also say, in retrospect, that the book's
weak sales were a disguised blessing, "for I hadn't ballast on board in those days to
stand up to the gale of success, which means incidentally money." He would be spared
the gale of success for nine more years, during which he published seven books,
including a collection of children's stories and two collaborative novels with his friend
William Alexander Bryce.

In 1907, two events occurred that altered the course of Stacpoole's life: he wrote The
Blue Lagoon and he married Margaret Robson. Unable to sleep one night, he found
himself thinking about and envying the caveman, who in his primitiveness was able to
marvel at such commonplace phenomena as sunsets and thunderstorms. Civilized,
technological man had unveiled these mysteries with his telescopes and weather
balloons, so that they were no longer "nameless wonders" to be feared and
contemplated. As a doctor, Stacpoole had witnessed countless births and deaths, and
these events no longer seemed miraculous to him. He conceived the idea of two
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children growing up alone on an island and experiencing storms, death, and birth in
almost complete ignorance and innocence. The next morning, he started writing The
Blue Lagoon. The exercise was therapeutic because he was able to experience the
wonders of life and death vicariously through his characters.

The Blue Lagoon is the story of two cousins, Dicky and Emmeline Lestrange, stranded
on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy
Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in
paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to
another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and
eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they
manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially
remarkable: fifteen-year-old Emmeline, alone in the jungle, loses consciousness and
awakes to find a baby boy on the ground near her. Naming the boy Hannah (an
example of Stacpoole's penchant for gender reversals), the Lestranges live in familial
bliss until they are unexpectedly expelled from their tropical Eden.

The parallels between The Blue Lagoon and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve are
obvious and intentional, but Stacpoole was also influenced by Lewis Carroll's Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which he invokes in a passage describing the
castaways' approach Palm Tree Island:

"One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into
the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the
sculls could have driven it. Seagulls screamed about them, the boat rocked and
swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut her eyes TIGHT.

"Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf
became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and
found herself in Wonderland."

This direct reference to Wonderland prepares the reader for the many parallels that
follow. When their adventures begin, both girls are about the same age, Alice seven
and a half, Emmeline exactly eight. Just as Alice joins a tea party in Wonderland,
Emmeline plays with her tiny tea set on the beach after they land. Emmeline's former
pet, like the Cheshire Cat, "had white stripes and a white chest, and rings down its
tail" and died "showing its teeth." Whereas Alice looks for a poison label on a bottle
that says "Drink Me," Emmeline innocently tries to eat "the never-wake-up berries"
and receives a stern rebuke and a lecture about poison from Paddy Button. "The
Poetry of Learning" chapter echoes Alice's dialogue with the caterpillar. Like the wily
creature smoking a hookah, Paddy smokes a pipe and shouts "Hurroo!" as the children
teach him to write his name in the sand. The children lose "all count of time," just as
the Mad Hatter does. Whereas Alice grows nine feet taller, Dick sprouts "two inches
taller" and Emmeline "twice as plump." Like the baby in the "Pig and Pepper," Hannah
sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel is artfully littered with references to
wonder, curiosity, and strangeness—all evidence of Stacpoole's conscious effort to
invoke and honor his Victorian predecessor.

Stacpoole presented The Blue Lagoon to Publisher T. Fisher Unwin in September 1907
and went to Cumberland to assist another ailing doctor in his practice. Every day from
Eden Vue in Langwathby, Stacpoole wrote to his fiancee, Margaret Robson (or
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Maggie, as he called her), and waited anxiously for their wedding day. On December
17, 1907, the couple were married and spent their honeymoon at Stebbing Park, a
friend's country house in Essex, about three miles from the village of Stebbing. It was
there that they stumbled upon Rose Cottage, where Stacpoole lived for several years
before he moved to Cliff Dene on the Isle of Wight in the 1920s.

Published in January 1908, The Blue Lagoon was an immediate success, both with
reviewers and the public. "[This] tale of the discovery of love, and innocent mating, is
as fresh as the ozone that made them strong," declared one reviewer. Another claimed
that "for once the title of `romance,' found in so many modern stories, is really
justified." The novel was reprinted more than twenty times in the next twelve years
and remained popular in other forms for more than eighty years. Norman MacOwen
and Charlton Mann adapted the story as a play, which ran for 263 performances in
London from August 28, 1920, to April 16, 1921. Film versions of the novel were made
in 1923, 1949, and 1980.

Stacpoole also wrote two successful sequels: The Garden of God (1923) and The Gates
of Morning (1925). These three books and two others were combined to form The Blue
Lagoon Omnibus in 1933. The Garden of God was filmed as Return to the Blue Lagoon
in 1992.

This Gutenberg etext of The Blue Lagoon: A Romance is based on the 1908 first
American edition published by J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia.
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by H. de Vere Stacpoole

CONTENTS

BOOK I

PART I
I. WHERE THE SLUSH LAMP BURNS
II. UNDER THE STARS
III. THE SHADOW AND THE FIRE
IV. AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED
V. VOICES HEARD IN THE MIST
VI. DAWN ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA
VII. STORY OF THE PIG AND THE BILLY-GOAT
VIII. "S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H"
IX. SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT
X. THE TRAGEDY OF THE BOATS

PART II
XI. THE ISLAND
XII. THE LAKE OF AZURE
XIII. DEATH VEILED WITH LICHEN
XIV. ECHOES OF FAIRY-LAND
XV. FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE

PART III
XVI. THE POETRY OF LEARNING
XVII. THE DEVIL'S CASK
XVIII. THE RAT HUNT
XIX. STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM
XX. THE DREAMER ON THE REEF
XXI. THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS
XXII. ALONE
XXIII. THEY MOVE AWAY
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BOOK II

PART I
I. UNDER THE ARTU TREE
II. HALF CHILD-HALF SAVAGE
III. THE DEMON OF THE REEF
IV. WHAT BEAUTY CONCEALED
V. THE SOUND OF A DRUM
VI. SAILS UPON THE SEA
VII. THE SCHOONER
VIII. LOVE STEPS IN
IX. THE SLEEP OF PARADISE

PART II
X. AN ISLAND HONEYMOON
XI. THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE
XII. THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE (CONTINUED)
XIII. THE NEWCOMER
XIV. HANNAH
XV. THE LAGOON OF FIRE
XVI. THE CYCLONE
XVII. THE STRICKEN WOODS
XVIII. A FALLEN IDOL
XIX. THE EXPEDITION
XX. THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON
XXI. THE HAND OF THE SEA
XXII. TOGETHER

BOOK III
I. MAD LESTRANGE
II. THE SECRET OF THE AZURE
III. CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN
IV. DUE SOUTH
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BOOK I

PART I

CHAPTER I

WHERE THE SLUSH LAMP BURNS

Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing
the "Shan van vaught," and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his
left heel on the fo'cs'le deck.
vaught."
van
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the
in
are
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"O
He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize—green in
parts from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shell-back, round-shouldered,
hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab about it.

His face was like a moon, seen red through tropical mists; and as he played it wore an
expression of strained attention as though the fiddle were telling him tales much more
marvellous than the old bald statement about Bantry Bay.

"Left-handed Pat," was his fo'cs'le name; not because he was left-handed, but simply
because everything he did he did wrong—or nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling
a slush tub—if a mistake was to be made, he made it.

He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these
forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief
in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr Button's nature was
such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in 'Frisco, though he had got
drunk in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and been
man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies about with him—they, and a
very large stock of original innocence.

Nearly over the musician's head swung a hammock from which hung a leg; other
hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of lemurs and arboreal
bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light forward past the heel of the bowsprit
to the knightheads, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a
face from which protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark mossy hair, here an
arm tattooed.

It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships' crews, and the
fo'cs'le of the Northumberland had a full company: a crowd of packet rats such as
often is to be found on a Cape Horner "Dutchmen" [sic] Americans—men who were
farm labourers and tending pigs in Ohio three months back, old seasoned sailors like
Paddy Button—a mixture of the best and the worst of the earth, such as you find
nowhere else in so small a space as in a ship's fo'cs'le.
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The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn. Bound from
New Orleans to 'Frisco she had spent thirty days battling with head-winds and
storms—down there, where the seas are so vast that three waves may cover with their
amplitude more than a mile of sea space; thirty days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and
just now, at the moment of this story, she was locked in a calm south of the line.

Mr Button finished his tune with a sweep of the bow, and drew his right coat sleeve
across his forehead. Then he took out a sooty pipe, filled it with tobacco, and lit it.

"Pawthrick," drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which depended the leg,
"what was that yarn you wiz beginnin' to spin ter night 'bout a lip-me-dawn?"

"A which me-dawn?" asked Mr Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom of the
hammock while he held the match to his pipe.

"It vas about a green thing," came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk.

"Oh, a Leprachaun, you mane. Sure, me mother's sister had one down in Connaught."

"Vat vas it like?" asked the dreamy Dutch voice—a voice seemingly possessed by the
calm that had made the sea like a mirror for the last three days, reducing the whole
ship's company meanwhile to the level of wasters.

"Like? Sure, it was like a Leprachaun; and what else would it be like?"

"What like vas that?" persisted the voice.

"It was like a little man no bigger than a big forked radish, an' as green as a cabbidge.
Me a'nt had one in her house down in Connaught in the ould days. O musha! musha!
the ould days, the ould days! Now, you may b'lave me or b'lave me not, but you could
have put him in your pocket, and the grass-green head of him wouldn't more than'v
stuck out. She kept him in a cupboard, and out of the cupboard he'd pop if it was a
crack open, an' into the milk pans he'd be, or under the beds, or pullin' the stool from
under you, or at some other divarsion. He'd chase the pig—the crathur!—till it'd be all
ribs like an ould umbrilla with the fright, an' as thin as a greyhound with the runnin'
by the marnin; he'd addle the eggs so the cocks an' hens wouldn't know what they wis
afther wid the chickens comin' out wid two heads on them, an' twinty-seven legs fore
and aft. And you'd start to chase him, an' then it'd be main-sail haul, and away he'd go,
you behint him, till you'd landed tail over snout in a ditch, an' he'd be back in the
cupboard."

"He was a Troll," murmured the Dutch voice.

"I'm tellin' you he was a Leprachaun, and there's no knowin' the divilments he'd be up
to. He'd pull the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot boilin' on the fire forenint your eyes,
and baste you in the face with it; and thin, maybe, you'd hold out your fist to him, and
he'd put a goulden soverin in it."

"Wisht he was here!" murmured a voice from a bunk near the knightheads.
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"Pawthrick," drawled the voice from the hammock above, "what'd you do first if you
found y'self with twenty pound in your pocket?"

"What's the use of askin' me?" replied Mr Button. "What's the use of twenty pound to a
sayman at say, where the grog's all wather an' the beef's all horse? Gimme it ashore,
an' you'd see what I'd do wid it!"

"I guess the nearest grog-shop keeper wouldn't see you comin' for dust," said a voice
from Ohio.

"He would not," said Mr Button; "nor you afther me. Be damned to the grog and thim
that sells it!"

"It's all darned easy to talk," said Ohio. "You curse the grog at sea when you can't get
it; set you ashore, and you're bung full."

"I likes me dhrunk," said Mr Button, "I'm free to admit; an' I'm the divil when it's in
me, and it'll be the end of me yet, or me ould mother was a liar. `Pat,' she says, first
time I come home from say rowlin', `storms you may escape, an wimmen you may
escape, but the potheen 'ill have you.' Forty year ago—forty year ago!"

"Well," said Ohio, "it hasn't had you yet."

"No," replied Mr Button, "but it will."

CHAPTER II

UNDER THE STARS

It was a wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty and beauty of starlight
and a tropic calm.

The Pacific slept; a vast, vague swell flowing from far away down south under the
night, lifted the Northumberland on its undulations to the rattling sound of the reef
points and the occasional creak of the rudder; whilst overhead, near the fiery arch of
the Milky Way, hung the Southern Cross like a broken kite.

Stars in the sky, stars in the sea, stars by the million and the million; so many lamps
ablaze that the firmament filled the mind with the idea of a vast and populous city—yet
from all that living and flashing splendour not a sound.

Down in the cabin—or saloon, as it was called by courtesy—were seated the three
passengers of the ship; one reading at the table, two playing on the floor.

The man at the table, Arthur Lestrange, was seated with his large, deep-sunken eyes
fixed on a book. He was most evidently in consumption—very near, indeed, to reaping
the result of that last and most desperate remedy, a long sea voyage.

Emmeline Lestrange, his little niece—eight years of age, a mysterious mite, small for
her age, with thoughts of her own, wide-pupilled eyes that seemed the doors for
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visions, and a face that seemed just to have peeped into this world for a moment ere it
was as suddenly withdrawn—sat in a corner nursing something in her arms, and
rocking herself to the tune of her own thoughts.

Dick, Lestrange's little son, eight and a bit, was somewhere under the table. They
were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for the sun and splendour of Los
Angeles, where Lestrange had bought a small estate, hoping there to enjoy the life
whose lease would be renewed by the long sea voyage.

As he sat reading, the cabin door opened, and appeared an angular female form. This
was Mrs Stannard, the stewardess, and Mrs Stannard meant bedtime.

"Dicky," said Mr Lestrange, closing his book, and raising the table-cloth a few inches,
"bedtime."

"Oh, not yet, daddy!" came a sleep-freighted voice from under the table; "I ain't ready.
I dunno want to go to bed, I— Hi yow!"

Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped under the table, seized him by the foot,
and hauled him out kicking and fighting and blubbering all at the same time.

As for Emmeline, she having glanced up and recognised the inevitable, rose to her
feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had been nursing, head down and dangling
in one hand, she stood waiting till Dicky, after a few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly
dried his eyes and held up a tear-wet face for his father to kiss. Then she presented
her brow solemnly to her uncle, received a kiss, and vanished, led by the hand into a
cabin on the port side of the saloon.

Mr Lestrange returned to his book, but he had not read for long when the cabin door
was opened, and Emmeline, in her nightdress, reappeared, holding a brown paper
parcel in her hand, a parcel of about the same size as the book you are reading.

"My box," said she; and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove its safety, the little
plain face altered to the face of an angel.

She had smiled.

When Emmeline Lestrange smiled it was absolutely as if the light of Paradise had
suddenly flashed upon her face: the happiest form of childish beauty suddenly
appeared before your eyes, dazzled them and was gone.

Then she vanished with her box, and Mr Lestrange resumed his book.

This box of Emmeline's, I may say in parenthesis, had given more trouble aboard ship
than all of the rest of the passengers' luggage put together.

It had been presented to her on her departure from Boston by a lady friend, and what
it contained was a dark secret to all on board, save its owner and her uncle; she was a
woman, or, at all events, the beginning of a woman, yet she kept this secret to
herself—a fact which you will please note.
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The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost. Suspecting herself,
maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled with robbers, she would cart it
about with her for safety, sit down behind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of
abstraction; be recalled to life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what
not, rise to superintend the operations—and then suddenly find she had lost her box.

Then she would absolutely haunt the ship. Wide-eyed and distressed of face she would
wander hither and thither, peeping into the galley, peeping down the forescuttle,
never uttering a word or wail, searching like an uneasy ghost, but dumb.

She seemed ashamed to tell of her loss, ashamed to let any one know of it; but every
one knew of it directly they saw her, to use Mr Button's expression, "on the wandher,"
and every one hunted for it.

Strangely enough it was Paddy Button who usually found it. He who was always doing
the wrong thing in the eyes of men, generally did the right thing in the eyes of
children. Children, in fact, when they could get at Mr Button, went for him con amore.
He was as attractive to them as a Punch and Judy show or a German band—almost.

Mr Lestrange after a while closed the book he was reading, looked around him and
sighed.

The cabin of the Northumberland was a cheerful enough place, pierced by the
polished shaft of the mizzen mast, carpeted with an Axminster carpet, and garnished
with mirrors let into the white pine panelling. Lestrange was staring at the reflection
of his own face in one of these mirrors fixed just opposite to where he sat.

His emaciation was terrible, and it was just perhaps at this moment that he first
recognised the fact that he must not only die, but die soon.

He turned from the mirror and sat for a while with his chin resting upon his hand, and
his eyes fixed on an ink spot upon the table-cloth; then he arose, and crossing the
cabin climbed laboriously up the companionway to the deck.

As he leaned against the bulwark rail to recover his breath, the splendour and beauty
of the Southern night struck him to the heart with a cruel pang. He took his seat on a
deck chair and gazed up at the Milky Way, that great triumphal arch built of suns that
the dawn would sweep away like a dream.

In the Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal
Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the
contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as
black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and
populous with stars.

Lestrange's eyes travelled from this mystery to the burning cross, and the nameless
and numberless stars reaching to the sea-line, where they paled and vanished in the
light of the rising moon. Then he became aware of a figure promenading the
quarterdeck. It was the "Old Man."
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A sea captain is always the "old man," be his age what it may. Captain Le Farges' age
might have been forty-five. He was a sailor of the Jean Bart type, of French descent,
but a naturalised American.

"I don't know where the wind's gone," said the captain as he drew near the man in the
deck chair. "I guess it's blown a hole in the firmament, and escaped somewheres to
the back of beyond."

"It's been a long voyage," said Lestrange; "and I'm thinking, Captain, it will be a very
long voyage for me. My port's not 'Frisco; I feel it."

"Don't you be thinking that sort of thing," said the other, taking his seat in a chair
close by. "There's no manner of use forecastin' the weather a month ahead. Now we're
in warm latitoods, your glass will rise steady, and you'll be as right and spry as any
one of us, before we fetch the Golden Gates."

"I'm thinking about the children," said Lestrange, seeming not to hear the captain's
words. "Should anything happen to me before we reach port, I should like you to do
something for me. It's only this: dispose of my body without—without the children
knowing. It has been in my mind to ask you this for some days. Captain, those children
know nothing of death."

Le Farge moved uneasily in his chair.

"Little Emmeline's mother died when she was two. Her father—my brother—died
before she was born. Dicky never knew a mother; she died giving him birth. My God,
Captain, death has laid a heavy hand on my family; can you wonder that I have hid his
very name from those two creatures that I love!"

"Ay, ay," said Le Farge, "it's sad! it's sad!"

"When I was quite a child," went on Lestrange, "a child no older than Dicky, my nurse
used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I was told I'd go to hell when I died if
I wasn't a good child. I cannot tell you how much that has poisoned my life, for the
thoughts we think in childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think
when we are grown up. And can a diseased father have healthy children?"

"I guess not."

"So I just said, when these two tiny creatures came into my care, that I would do all in
my power to protect them from the terrors of life—or rather, I should say, from the
terror of death. I don't know whether I have done right, but I have done it for the best.
They had a cat, and one day Dicky came in to me and said: `Father, pussy's in the
garden asleep, and I can't wake her.' So I just took him out for a walk; there was a
circus in the town, and I took him to it. It so filled his mind that he quite forgot the cat.
Next day he asked for her. I did not tell him she was buried in the garden, I just said
she must have run away. In a week he had forgotten all about her—children soon
forget."

"Ay, that's true," said the sea captain. "But 'pears to me they must learn some time
they've got to die."
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"Should I pay the penalty before we reach land, and be cast into that great, vast sea, I
would not wish the children's dreams to be haunted by the thought: just tell them I've
gone on board another ship. You will take them back to Boston; I have here, in a letter,
the name of a lady who will care for them. Dicky will be well off, as far as worldly
goods are concerned, and so will Emmeline. Just tell them I've gone on board another
ship—children soon forget."

"I'll do what you ask," said the seaman.

The moon was over the horizon now, and the Northumberland lay adrift in a river of
silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on the great sails, and the decks lay
like spaces of frost cut by shadows black as ebony.

As the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thoughts, a little white figure
emerged from the saloon hatch. It was Emmeline. She was a professed sleepwalker—a
past mistress of the art.

Scarcely had she stepped into dreamland than she had lost her precious box, and now
she was hunting for it on the decks of the Northumberland.

Mr Lestrange put his finger to his lips, took off his shoes and silently followed her. She
searched behind a coil of rope, she tried to open the galley door; hither and thither
she wandered, wide-eyed and troubled of face, till at last, in the shadow of the
hencoop, she found her visionary treasure. Then back she came, holding up her little
nightdress with one hand, so as not to trip, and vanished down the saloon companion
very hurriedly, as if anxious to get back to bed, her uncle close behind, with one hand
outstretched so as to catch her in case she stumbled.

CHAPTER III

THE SHADOW AND THE FIRE

It was the fourth day of the long calm. An awning had been rigged up on the poop for
the passengers, and under it sat Lestrange, trying to read, and the children trying to
play. The heat and monotony had reduced even Dicky to just a surly mass, languid in
movement as a grub. As for Emmeline, she seemed dazed. The rag-doll lay a yard
away from her on the poop deck, unnursed; even the wretched box and its
whereabouts she seemed to have quite forgotten.

"Daddy!" suddenly cried Dick, who had clambered up, and was looking over the
after-rail.

"What?"

"Fish!"

Lestrange rose to his feet, came aft and looked over the rail.

Down in the vague green of the water something moved, something pale and long—a
ghastly form. It vanished; and yet another came, neared the surface, and displayed
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itself more fully. Lestrange saw its eyes, he saw the dark fin, and the whole hideous
length of the creature; a shudder ran through him as he clasped Dicky.

"Ain't he fine?" said the child. "I guess, daddy, I'd pull him aboard if I had a hook. Why
haven't I a hook, daddy? Why haven't I a hook, daddy?— Ow, you're SQUEEZIN' me!"

Something plucked at Lestrange's coat: it was Emmeline—she also wanted to look. He

lifted her up in his arms; her little pale face peeped over the rail, but there was
nothing to see: the forms of terror had vanished, leaving the green depths untroubled
and unstained.

"What's they called, daddy?" persisted Dick, as his father took him down from the rail,
and led him back to the chair.

"Sharks," said Lestrange, whose face was covered with perspiration.

He picked up the book he had been reading—it was a volume of

Tennyson—and he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit main-deck
barred with the white shadows of the standing rigging.

The sea had disclosed to him a vision. Poetry, Philosophy, Beauty, Art, the love and joy
of life—was it possible that these should exist in the same world as those?

He glanced at the book upon his knees, and contrasted the beautiful things in it which
he remembered with the terrible things he had just seen, the things that were waiting
for their food under the keel of the ship.

It was three bells—half-past three in the afternoon—and the ship's bell

had just rung out. The stewardess appeared to take the children below; and as they
vanished down the saloon companionway, Captain Le Farge came aft, on to the poop,
and stood for a moment looking over the sea on the port side, where a bank of fog had
suddenly appeared like the spectre of a country.

"The sun has dimmed a bit," said he; "I can a'most look at it. Glass steady
enough—there's a fog coming up—ever seen a Pacific fog?"

"No, never."

"Well, you won't want to see another," replied the mariner, shading his eyes and fixing
them upon the sea-line. The sea-line away to starboard had lost somewhat its
distinctness, and over the day an almost imperceptible shade had crept.

The captain suddenly turned from his contemplation of the sea and sky, raised his
head and sniffed.

"Something is burning somewhere—smell it? Seems to me like an old mat or

summat. It's that swab of a steward, maybe; if he isn't breaking glass, he's upsetting
lamps and burning holes in the carpet. Bless MY soul, I'd sooner have a dozen Mary
Anns an' their dustpans round the place than one tomfool steward like Jenkins." He
went to the saloon hatch. "Below there!"
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"Ay, ay, sir."

"What are you burning?"

"I an't burnin' northen, sir."

"Tell you, I smell it!"

"There's northen burnin' here, sir."

"Neither is there; it's all on deck. Something in the galley, maybe—rags, most
likely, they've thrown on the fire."

"Captain!" said Lestrange.

"Ay, ay."

"Come here, please."

Le Farge climbed on to the poop.

"I don't know whether it's my weakness that's affecting my eyes, but there seems to
me something strange about the main-mast."

The main-mast near where it entered the deck, and for some distance up, seemed in
motion—a corkscrew movement most strange to watch from the shelter of the
awning.

This apparent movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one
could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast round which it
curled.

"My God!" cried Le Farge, as he sprang from the poop and rushed forward.

Lestrange followed him slowly, stopping every moment to clutch the bulwark rail and
pant for breath. He heard the shrill bird-like notes of the bosun's pipe. He saw the
hands emerging from the forecastle, like bees out of a hive; he watched them
surrounding the main-hatch. He watched the tarpaulin and locking-bars removed. He
saw the hatch opened, and a burst of smoke—black, villainous
smoke—ascend to the sky, solid as a plume in the windless air.

Lestrange was a man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this sort of man
who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your level-headed, phlegmatic individual
loses his balance. His first thought was of the children, his second of the boats.

In the battering off Cape Horn the Northumberland lost several of her boats. There
were left the long-boat, a quarter-boat, and the dinghy. He heard Le Farge's voice
ordering the hatch to be closed and the pumps manned, so as to flood the hold; and,
knowing that he could do nothing on deck, he made as swiftly as he could for the
saloon companionway.
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Mrs Stannard was just coming out of the children's cabin.

"Are the children lying down, Mrs Stannard?" asked Lestrange, almost breathless from
the excitement and exertion of the last few minutes.

The woman glanced at him with frightened eyes. He looked like the very herald of
disaster.

"For if they are, and you have undressed them, then you must put their clothes on
again. The ship is on fire, Mrs Stannard."

"Good God, sir!"

"Listen!" said Lestrange.

From a distance, thin, and dreary as the crying of sea-gulls on a desolate beach, came
the clanking of the pumps.

CHAPTER IV

AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED

Before the woman had time to speak a thunderous step was heard on the companion
stairs, and Le Farge broke into the saloon. The man's face was injected with blood, his
eyes were fixed and glassy like the eyes of a drunkard, and the veins stood on his
temples like twisted cords.

"Get those children ready!" he shouted, as he rushed into his own cabin. "Get you all
ready—boats are being swung out and victualled. Ho! where are those papers?"

They heard him furiously searching and collecting things in his cabin—the
ship's papers, accounts, things the master mariner clings to as he clings to his life;
and as he searched, and found, and packed, he kept bellowing orders for the children
to be got on deck. Half mad he seemed, and half mad he was with the knowledge of
the terrible thing that was stowed amidst the cargo.

Up on deck the crew, under the direction of the first mate, were working in an orderly
manner, and with a will, utterly unconscious of there being anything beneath their feet
but an ordinary cargo on fire. The covers had been stripped from the boats, kegs of
water and bags of biscuit placed in them. The dinghy, smallest of the boats and most
easily got away, was hanging at the port quarter-boat davits flush with the bulwarks;
and Paddy Button was in the act of stowing a keg of water in her, when Le Farge
broke on to the deck, followed by the stewardess carrying Emmeline, and Mr
Lestrange leading Dick. The dinghy was rather a larger boat than the ordinary ships'
dinghy, and possessed a small mast and long sail. Two sailors stood ready to man the
falls, and Paddy Button was just turning to trundle forward again when the captain
seized him.

"Into the dinghy with you," he cried, "and row these children and the passenger out a
mile from the ship—two miles, three miles, make an offing."
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"Sure, Captain dear, I've left me fiddle in the—"

Le Farge dropped the bundle of things he was holding under his left arm, seized the
old sailor and rushed him against the bulwarks, as if he meant to fling him into the sea
THROUGH the bulwarks.

Next moment Mr Button was in the boat. Emmeline was handed to him, pale of face
and wide-eyed, and clasping something wrapped in a little shawl; then Dick, and then
Mr Lestrange was helped over.

"No room for more!" cried Le Farge. "Your place will be in the long-boat, Mrs
Stannard, if we have to leave the ship. Lower away, lower away!"

The boat sank towards the smooth blue sea, kissed it and was afloat.

Now Mr Button, before joining the ship at Boston, had spent a good while lingering by
the quay, having no money wherewith to enjoy himself in a tavern. He had seen
something of the lading of the Northumberland, and heard more from a stevedore. No
sooner had he cast off the falls and seized the oars, than his knowledge awoke in his
mind, living and lurid. He gave a whoop that brought the two sailors leaning over the
side.

"Bullies!"

"Ay, ay!"

"Run for your lives I've just rimimbered—there's two bar'ls of blastin' powther
in the houldt."

Then he bent to his oars, as no man ever bent before. Lestrange, sitting in the
stern-sheets clasping Emmeline and Dick, saw nothing for a moment after hearing
these words. The children, who knew nothing of blasting powder or its effects, though
half frightened by all the bustle and excitement, were still amused and pleased at
finding themselves in the little boat so close to the blue pretty sea.

Dick put his finger over the side, so that it made a ripple in the water (the most
delightful experience of childhood). Emmeline, with one hand clasped in her uncle's,
watched Mr Button with a grave sort of half pleasure.

He certainly was a sight worth watching. His soul was filled with tragedy and terror.
His Celtic imagination heard the ship blowing up, saw himself and the little dinghy
blown to pieces—nay, saw himself in hell, being toasted by "divils."

But tragedy and terror could find no room for expression on his fortunate or
unfortunate face. He puffed and he blew, bulging his cheeks out at the sky as he
tugged at the oars, making a hundred and one grimaces—all the outcome of
agony of mind, but none expressing it. Behind lay the ship, a picture not without its
lighter side. The long-boat and the quarter-boat, lowered with a rush and seaborne by
the mercy of Providence, were floating by the side of the Northumberland.
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From the ship men were casting themselves overboard like water-rats, swimming in
the water like ducks, scrambling on board the boats anyhow.

From the half-opened main-hatch the black smoke, mixed now with sparks, rose
steadily and swiftly and spitefully, as if driven through the half-closed teeth of a
dragon.

A mile away beyond the Northumberland stood the fog bank. It looked solid, like a vast
country that had suddenly and strangely built itself on the sea—a country
where no birds sang and no trees grew. A country with white, precipitous cliffs, solid
to look at as the cliffs of Dover.

"I'm spint!" suddenly gasped the oarsman, resting the oar handles under the crook of
his knees, and bending down as if he was preparing to butt at the passengers in the
stern-sheets. "Blow up or blow down, I'm spint, don't ax me, I'm spint."

Mr Lestrange, white as a ghost, but recovered somewhat from his first horror, gave
the Spent One time to recover himself and turned to look at the ship. She seemed a
great distance off, and the boats, well away from her, were making at a furious pace
towards the dinghy. Dick was still playing with the water, but Emmeline's eyes were
entirely occupied with Paddy Button. New things were always of vast interest to her
contemplative mind, and these evolutions of her old friend were eminently new.

She had seen him swilling the decks, she had seen him dancing a jig, she had seen him
going round the main deck on all fours with Dick on his back, but she had never seen
him going on like this before.

She perceived now that he was exhausted, and in trouble about something, and,
putting her hand in the pocket of her dress, she searched for something that she knew
was there. She produced a Tangerine orange, and leaning forward she touched the
Spent One's head with it.

Mr Button raised his head, stared vacantly for a second, saw the proffered orange, and
at the sight of it the thought of "the childer" and their innocence, himself and the
blasting powder, cleared his dazzled wits, and he took to the sculls again.

"Daddy," said Dick, who had been looking astern, "there's clouds near the ship."

In an incredibly short space of time the solid cliffs of fog had broken. The faint wind
that had banked it had pierced it, and was now making pictures and devices of it, most
wonderful and weird to see. Horsemen of the mist rode on the water, and were
dissolved; billows rolled on the sea, yet were not of the sea; blankets and spirals of
vapour ascended to high heaven. And all with a terrible languor of movement. Vast
and lazy and sinister, yet steadfast of purpose as Fate or Death, the fog advanced,
taking the world for its own.

Against this grey and indescribably sombre background stood the smouldering ship
with the breeze already shivering in her sails, and the smoke from her main-hatch
blowing and beckoning as if to the retreating boats.
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"Why's the ship smoking like that?" asked Dick. "And look at those boats
coming—when are we going back, daddy?"

"Uncle," said Emmeline, putting her hand in his, as she gazed towards the ship and
beyond it, "I'm 'fraid."

"What frightens you, Emmy?" he asked, drawing her to him.

"Shapes," replied Emmeline, nestling up to his side.

"Oh, Glory be to God!" gasped the old sailor, suddenly resting on his oars. "Will yiz
look at the fog that's comin'—"

"I think we had better wait here for the boats," said Mr Lestrange; "we are far enough
now to be safe if anything happens."

"Ay, ay," replied the oarsman, whose wits had returned. "Blow up or blow down, she
won't hit us from here."

"Daddy," said Dick, "when are we going back? I want my tea."

"We aren't going back, my child," replied his father. "The ship's on fire; we are waiting
for another ship."

"Where's the other ship?" asked the child, looking round at the horizon that was clear.

"We can't see it yet," replied the unhappy man, "but it will come."

The long-boat and the quarter-boat were slowly approaching. They looked like beetles
crawling over the water, and after them across the glittering surface came a dullness
that took the sparkle from the sea—a dullness that swept and spread like an
eclipse shadow.

Now the wind struck the dinghy. It was like a wind from fairyland, almost
imperceptible, chill, and dimming the sun. A wind from Lilliput. As it struck the
dinghy, the fog took the distant ship.

It was a most extraordinary sight, for in less than thirty seconds the ship of wood
became a ship of gauze, a tracery flickered, and was gone forever from the sight of
man.

CHAPTER V

VOICES HEARD IN THE MIST

The sun became fainter still, and vanished. Though the air round the dinghy seemed
quite clear, the on-coming boats were hazy and dim, and that part of the horizon that
had been fairly clear was now blotted out.
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The long-boat was leading by a good way. When she was within hailing distance the
captain's voice came.

"Dinghy ahoy!"

"Ahoy!"

"Fetch alongside here!"

The long-boat ceased rowing to wait for the quarter-boat that was slowly creeping up.
She was a heavy boat to pull at all times, and now she was overloaded.

The wrath of Captain Le Farge with Paddy Button for the way he had stampeded the
crew was profound, but he had not time to give vent to it.

"Here, get aboard us, Mr Lestrange!" said he, when the dinghy was alongside; "we
have room for one. Mrs Stannard is in the quarter-boat, and it's overcrowded; she's
better aboard the dinghy, for she can look after the kids. Come, hurry up, the smother
is coming down on us fast. Ahoy!"—to the quarter-boat, "hurry up, hurry up."

The quarter-boat had suddenly vanished.

Mr Lestrange climbed into the long-boat. Paddy pushed the dinghy a few yards away
with the tip of a scull, and then lay on his oars waiting.

"Ahoy! ahoy!" cried Le Farge.

"Ahoy!" came from the fog bank.

Next moment the long-boat and the dinghy vanished from each other's sight: the great
fog bank had taken them.

Now a couple of strokes of the port scull would have brought Mr Button alongside the
long-boat, so close was he; but the quarter-boat was in his mind, or rather
imagination, so what must he do but take three powerful strokes in the direction in
which he fancied the quarter-boat to be.

The rest was voices.

"Dinghy ahoy!"

"Ahoy!"

"Ahoy!"

"Don't be shoutin' together, or I'll not know which way to pull. Quarter-boat ahoy!
where are yez?"

"Port your helm!"

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"Ay, ay!" putting his helm, so to speak, to starboard—"I'll be wid yiz in wan
minute, two or three minutes' hard pulling."

"Ahoy!"—much more faint.

"What d'ye mane rowin' away from me?"—a dozen strokes.

"Ahoy!" fainter still.

Mr Button rested on his oars.

"Divil mend them I b'lave that was the long-boat shoutin'."

He took to his oars again and pulled vigorously.

"Paddy," came Dick's small voice, apparently from nowhere, "where are we now?"

"Sure, we're in a fog; where else would we be? Don't you be affeared."

"I ain't affeared, but Em's shivering."

"Give her me coat," said the oarsman, resting on his oars and taking it off. "Wrap it
round her; and when it's round her we'll all let one big halloo together. There's an ould
shawl som'er in the boat, but I can't be after lookin' for it now."

He held out the coat and an almost invisible hand took it; at the same moment a
tremendous report shook the sea and sky.

"There she goes," said Mr Button; "an' me old fiddle an' all. Don't be frightened,
childer; it's only a gun they're firin' for divarsion. Now we'll all halloo
togither—are yiz ready?"

"Ay, ay," said Dick, who was a picker-up of sea terms.

"Halloo!" yelled Pat.

"Halloo! Halloo!" piped Dick and Emmeline.

A faint reply came, but from where, it was difficult to say. The old man rowed a few
strokes and then paused on his oars. So still was the surface of the sea that the
chuckling of the water at the boat's bow as she drove forward under the impetus of
the last powerful stroke could be heard distinctly. It died out as she lost way, and
silence closed round them like a ring.

The light from above, a light that seemed to come through a vast scuttle of deeply
muffed glass, faint though it was, almost to extinction, still varied as the little boat
floated through the strata of the mist.

A great sea fog is not homogeneous—its density varies: it is honeycombed with

streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing
place with the subtlety of legerdemain. It has also this wizard peculiarity, that it grows
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with the sinking of the sun and the approach of darkness.

The sun, could they have seen it, was now leaving the horizon.

They called again. Then they waited, but there was no response.

"There's no use bawlin' like bulls to chaps that's deaf as adders," said the old sailor,
shipping his oars; immediately upon which declaration he gave another shout, with the
same result as far as eliciting a reply.

"Mr Button!" came Emmeline's voice.

"What is it, honey?"

"I'm 'fraid."

"You wait wan minit till I find the shawl—here it is, by the same
token!—an' I'll wrap you up in it."

He crept cautiously aft to the stern-sheets and took Emmeline in his arms.

"Don't want the shawl," said Emmeline; "I'm not so much afraid in your coat." The
rough, tobacco-smelling old coat gave her courage somehow.

"Well, thin, keep it on. Dicky, are you cowld?"

"I've got into daddy's great coat; he left it behind him."

"Well, thin, I'll put the shawl round me own shoulders, for it's cowld I am. Are ya
hungray, childer?"

"No," said Dick, "but I'm direfully slapy?"

"Slapy, is it? Well, down you get in the bottom of the boat, and here's the shawl for a
pilla. I'll be rowin' again in a minit to keep meself warm."

He buttoned the top button of the coat.

"I'm a'right," murmured Emmeline in a dreamy voice.

"Shut your eyes tight," replied Mr Button, "or Billy Winker will be dridgin' sand in
them.
O.'"
babby
the
by
a
shoheen,Hush
shoheen,
shoheen,
sho-hu-lo.Shoheen,
shoheen,Sho-hu-lo,
shoheen,
shoheen,
`Shoheen,
It was the tag of an old nursery folk-song they sing in the hovels of the Achill coast
fixed in his memory, along with the rain and the wind and the smell of the burning
turf, and the grunting of the pig and the knickety-knock of a rocking cradle.

"She's off," murmured Mr Button to himself, as the form in his arms relaxed. Then he
laid her gently down beside Dick. He shifted forward, moving like a crab. Then he put
his hand to his pocket for his pipe and tobacco and tinder box. They were in his coat
pocket, but Emmeline was in his coat. To search for them would be to awaken her.
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The darkness of night was now adding itself to the blindness of the fog. The oarsman
could not see even the thole pins. He sat adrift mind and body. He was, to use his own
expression, "moithered." Haunted by the mist, tormented by "shapes."

It was just in a fog like this that the Merrows could be heard disporting in Dunbeg
bay, and off the Achill coast. Sporting and laughing, and hallooing through the mist, to
lead unfortunate fishermen astray.

Merrows are not altogether evil, but they have green hair and teeth, fishes' tails and
fins for arms; and to hear them walloping in the water around you like salmon, and
you alone in a small boat, with the dread of one coming floundering on board, is
enough to turn a man's hair grey.

For a moment he thought of awakening the children to keep him company, but he was
ashamed. Then he took to the sculls again, and rowed "by the feel of the water." The
creak of the oars was like a companion's voice, the exercise lulled his fears. Now and
again, forgetful of the sleeping children, he gave a halloo, and paused to listen. But no
answer came.

Then he continued rowing, long, steady, laborious strokes, each taking him further
and further from the boats that he was never destined to sight again.

CHAPTER VI

DAWN ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA

"Is it aslape I've been?" said Mr Button, suddenly awaking with a start.

He had shipped his oars just for a minute's rest. He must have slept for hours, for
now, behold, a warm, gentle wind was blowing, the moon was shining, and the fog was
gone.

"Is it dhraming I've been?" continued the awakened one.

"Where am I at all, at all? O musha! sure, here I am. O wirra! wirra! I dreamt I'd gone
aslape on the main-hatch and the ship was blown up with powther, and it's all come
true."

"Mr Button!" came a small voice from the stern-sheets (Emmeline's).

"What is it, honey?"

"Where are we now?"

"Sure, we're afloat on the say, acushla; where else would we be?"

"Where's uncle?"

"He's beyant there in the long-boat—he'll be afther us in a minit."

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"I want a drink."

He filled a tin pannikin that was by the beaker of water, and gave her a drink. Then he
took his pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket.

She almost immediately fell asleep again beside Dick, who had not stirred or moved;
and the old sailor, standing up and steadying himself, cast his eyes round the horizon.
Not a sign of sail or boat was there on all the moonlit sea.

From the low elevation of an open boat one has a very small horizon, and in the vague
world of moonlight somewhere round about it was possible that the boats might be
near enough to show up at daybreak.

But open boats a few miles apart may be separated by long leagues in the course of a
few hours. Nothing is more mysterious than the currents of the sea.

The ocean is an ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow, and a league from
where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an hour another boat may be drifting two.

A slight warm breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer;
the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps a thousand miles
away.

The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than the thoughts of
this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars. Thoughts as long as the world is
round. Blazing bar rooms in Callao—harbours over whose oily surfaces the
sampans slipped like water-beetles—the lights of Macao—the docks of
London. Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman
care to think about the sea, where life is all into the fo'cs'le and out again, where one
voyage blends and jumbles with another, where after forty-five years of reefing
topsails you can't well remember off which ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or
who it was killed who in the fo'cs'le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror
darkly, the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene lamp.

I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first ship he ever sailed in.
If you had asked him, he would probably have replied: "I disremimber; it was to the
Baltic, and cruel cowld weather, and I was say-sick till I near brought me boots up;
and it was 'O for ould Ireland!' I was cryin' all the time, an' the captin dhrummin me
back with a rope's end to the tune uv it—but the name of the hooker—I
disremimber—bad luck to her, whoever she was!"

So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned above him, and
calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palmshadowed harbours, and the men and
the women he had known—such men and such women! The derelicts of the
earth and the ocean. Then he nodded off to sleep again, and when he awoke the moon
had gone.

Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale fan of light, vague as the wing of
an ephemera. It vanished and changed back to darkness.
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Presently, and almost at a stroke, a pencil of fire ruled a line along the eastern
horizon, and the eastern sky became more beautiful than a rose leaf plucked in May.
The line of fire contracted into one increasing spot, the rim of the rising sun.

As the light increased the sky above became of a blue impossible to imagine unless
seen, a wan blue, yet living and sparkling as if born of the impalpable dust of
sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like the harp of Apollo touched by the fingers of
the god. The light was music to the soul. It was day.

"Daddy!" suddenly cried Dick, sitting up in the sunlight and rubbing his eyes with his
open palms. "Where are we?"

"All right, Dicky, me son!" cried the old sailor, who had been standing up casting his
eyes round in a vain endeavour to sight the boats. "Your daddy's as safe as if he was in
hivin; he'll be wid us in a minit, an' bring another ship along with him. So you're
awake, are you, Em'line?"

Emmeline, sitting up in the old pilot coat, nodded in reply without speaking. Another
child might have supplemented Dick's enquiries as to her uncle by questions of her
own, but she did not.

Did she guess that there was some subterfuge in Mr Button's answer, and that things
were different from what he was making them out to be? Who can tell?

She was wearing an old cap of Dick's, which Mrs Stannard in the hurry and confusion
had popped on her head. It was pushed to one side, and she made a quaint enough
little figure as she sat up in the early morning brightness, dressed in the old
salt-stained coat beside Dick, whose straw hat was somewhere in the bottom of the
boat, and whose auburn locks were blowing in the faint breeze.

"Hurroo!" cried Dick, looking around at the blue and sparkling water, and banging
with a stretcher on the bottom of the boat. "I'm goin' to be a sailor, aren't I, Paddy?
You'll let me sail the boat, won't you, Paddy, an' show me how to row?"

"Aisy does it," said Paddy, taking hold of the child. "I haven't a sponge or towel, but I'll
just wash your face in salt wather and lave you to dry in the sun."

He filled the bailing tin with sea water.

"I don't want to wash!" shouted Dick.

"Stick your face into the water in the tin," commanded Paddy. "You wouldn't be going
about the place with your face like a sut-bag, would you?"

"Stick yours in!" commanded the other.

Button did so, and made a hub-bubbling noise in the water; then he lifted a wet and
streaming face, and flung the contents of the bailing tin overboard.

"Now you've lost your chance," said this arch nursery strategist, "all the water's gone."
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"There's more in the sea."

"There's no more to wash with, not till to-morrow—the fishes don't allow it."

"I want to wash," grumbled Dick. "I want to stick my face in the tin, same's you did;
'sides, Em hasn't washed."

"I don't mind," murmured Emmeline.

"Well, thin," said Mr Button, as if making a sudden resolve, "I'll ax the sharks." He
leaned over the boat's side, his face close to the surface of the water. "Halloo there!"
he shouted, and then bent his head sideways to listen; the children also looked over
the side, deeply interested.

"Halloo there! Are y'aslape? Oh, there y'are! Here's a spalpeen with a dhirty face, an's
wishful to wash it; may I take a bailin' tin of— Oh, thank your 'arner, thank your
'arner—good day to you, and my respects."

"What did the shark say, Mr Button?" asked Emmeline.

"He said: `Take a bar'l full, an' welcome, Mister Button; an' it's wishful I am I had a
drop of the crathur to offer you this fine marnin'.' Thin he popped his head under his
fin and went aslape agin; leastwise, I heard him snore."

Emmeline nearly always "Mr Buttoned" her friend; sometimes she called him "Mr
Paddy." As for Dick, it was always "Paddy," pure and simple. Children have etiquettes
of their own.

It must often strike landsmen and landswomen that the most terrible experience when
cast away at sea in an open boat is the total absence of privacy. It seems an outrage
on decency on the part of Providence to herd people together so. But, whoever has
gone through the experience will bear me out that the human mind enlarges, and
things that would shock us ashore are as nothing out there, face to face with eternity.

If so with grown-up people, how much more so with this old shell-back and his two
charges?

And indeed Mr Button was a person who called a spade a spade, had no more
conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges just as a nursemaid might
look after her charges, or a walrus after its young.

There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and some tinned stuff—mostly
sardines.

I have known a sailor to open a box of sardines with a tin tack. He was in prison, the
sardines had been smuggled into him, and he had no can-opener. Only his genius and
a tin tack.

Paddy had a jack-knife, however, and in a marvellously short time a box of sardines
was opened, and placed on the stern-sheets beside some biscuits.
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These, with some water and Emmeline's Tangerine orange, which she produced and
added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fell to. When they had finished,
the remains were put carefully away, and they proceeded to step the tiny mast.

The sailor, when the mast was in its place, stood for a moment resting his hand on it,
and gazing around him over the vast and voiceless blue.

The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday, and the blue of
evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the happiest thing in
colour—sparkling, vague, newborn—the blue of heaven and youth.

"What are you looking for, Paddy?" asked Dick.

"Say-gulls," replied the prevaricator; then to himself: "Not a sight or a sound of them!
Musha! musha! which way will I steer—north, south, aist, or west? It's all wan,
for if I steer to the aist, they may be in the west; and if I steer to the west, they may be
in the aist; and I can't steer to the west, for I'd be steering right in the wind's eye. Aist
it is; I'll make a soldier's wind of it, and thrust to chance."

He set the sail and came aft with the sheet. Then he shifted the rudder, lit a pipe,
leaned luxuriously back and gave the bellying sail to the gentle breeze.

It was part of his profession, part of his nature, that, steering, maybe, straight towards
death by starvation and thirst, he was as unconcerned as if he were taking the
children for a summer's sail. His imagination dealt little with the future; almost
entirely influenced by his immediate surroundings, it could conjure up no fears from
the scene now before it. The children were the same.

Never was there a happier starting, more joy in a little boat. During breakfast the
seaman had given his charges to understand that if Dick did not meet his father and
Emmeline her uncle in a "while or two," it was because he had gone on board a ship,
and he'd be along presently. The terror of their position was as deeply veiled from
them as eternity is veiled from you or me.

The Pacific was still bound by one of those glacial calms that can only occur when the
sea has been free from storms for a vast extent of its surface, for a hurricane down by
the Horn will send its swell and disturbance beyond the Marquesas. De Bois in his
table of amplitudes points out that more than half the sea disturbances at any given
space are caused, not by the wind, but by storms at a great distance.

But the sleep of the Pacific is only apparent. This placid lake, over which the dinghy
was pursuing the running ripple, was heaving to an imperceptible swell and breaking
on the shores of the Low Archipelago, and the Marquesas in foam and thunder.

Emmeline's rag-doll was a shocking affair from a hygienic or artistic standpoint. Its
face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms; yet not for all the dolls in the world
would she have exchanged this filthy and nearly formless thing. It was a fetish.

She sat nursing it on one side of the helmsman, whilst Dick, on the other side, hung
his nose over the water, on the look-out for fish.
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"Why do you smoke, Mr Button?" asked Emmeline, who had been watching her friend
for some time in silence.

"To aise me thrubbles," replied Paddy.

He was leaning back with one eye shut and the other fixed on the luff of the sail. He
was in his element: nothing to do but steer and smoke, warmed by the sun and cooled
by the breeze. A landsman would have been half demented in his condition, many a
sailor would have been taciturn and surly, on the look-out for sails, and alternately
damning his soul and praying to his God. Paddy smoked.

"Whoop!" cried Dick. "Look, Paddy!"

An albicore a few cables-lengths to port had taken a flying leap from the flashing sea,
turned a complete somersault and vanished.

"It's an albicore takin' a buck lep. Hundreds I've seen before this; he's bein' chased."

"What's chasing him, Paddy?"

"What's chasin' him? why, what else but the gibly-gobly ums!"

Before Dick could enquire as to the personal appearance and habits of the latter, a
shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat and flittered into the water with a hissing
sound.

"Thim's flyin' fish. What are you sayin'?—fish can't fly! Where's the eyes in your
head?"

"Are the gibblyums chasing them too?" asked Emmeline fearfully.

"No; 'tis the Billy balloos that's afther thim. Don't be axin' me any more questions now,
or I'll be tellin' you lies in a minit."

Emmeline, it will be remembered, had brought a small parcel with her done up in a
little shawl; it was under the boat seat, and every now and then she would stoop down
to see if it were safe.

CHAPTER VII

STORY OF THE PIG AND THE BILLY-GOAT

Every hour or so Mr Button would shake his lethargy off, and rise and look round for
"seagulls," but the prospect was sail-less as the prehistoric sea, wingless, voiceless.
When Dick would fret now and then, the old sailor would always devise some means of
amusing him. He made him fishing tackle out of a bent pin and some small twine that
happened to be in the boat, and told him to fish for "pinkeens"; and Dick, with the
pathetic faith of childhood, fished.
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Then he told them things. He had spent a year at Deal long ago, where a cousin of his
was married to a boatman.

Mr Button had put in a year as a longshoreman at Deal, and he had got a great lot to
tell of his cousin and her husband, and more especially of one, Hannah; Hannah was
his cousin's baby—a most marvellous child, who was born with its "buck" teeth
fully developed, and whose first unnatural act on entering the world was to make a
snap at the "docther." "Hung on to his fist like a bull-dog, and him bawlin' `Murther!'"

"Mrs James," said Emmeline, referring to a Boston acquaintance, "had a little baby,
and it was pink."

"Ay, ay," said Paddy; "they're mostly pink to start with, but they fade whin they're
washed."

"It'd no teeth," said Emmeline, "for I put my finger in to see."

"The doctor brought it in a bag," put in Dick, who was still steadily
fishing—"dug it out of a cabbage patch; an' I got a trow'l and dug all our
cabbage patch up, but there weren't any babies but there were no end of worms."

"I wish I had a baby," said Emmeline, "and I wouldn't send it back to the cabbage
patch.

"The doctor," explained Dick, "took it back and planted it again; and Mrs James cried
when I asked her, and daddy said it was put back to grow and turn into an angel."

"Angels have wings," said Emmeline dreamily.

"And," pursued Dick, "I told cook, and she said to Jane [that] daddy was always
stuffing children up with—something or 'nother. And I asked daddy to let me
see him stuffing up a child—and daddy said cook'd have to go away for saying
that, and she went away next day."

"She had three big trunks and a box for her bonnet," said Emmeline, with a far-away
look as she recalled the incident.

"And the cabman asked her hadn't she any more trunks to put on his cab, and hadn't
she forgot the parrot cage," said Dick.

"I wish I had a parrot in a cage," murmured Emmeline, moving slightly so as to get
more in the shadow of the sail.

"And what in the world would you be doin' with a par't in a cage?" asked Mr Button.

"I'd let it out," replied Emmeline.

"Spakin' about lettin' par'ts out of cages, I remimber me grandfather had an ould pig,"
said Paddy (they were all talking seriously together like equals). "I was a spalpeen no
bigger than the height of me knee, and I'd go to the sty door, and he'd come to the
door, and grunt an' blow wid his nose undher it; an' I'd grunt back to vex him, an'
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hammer wid me fist on it, an' shout `Halloo there! halloo there!' and `Halloo to you!'
he'd say, spakin' the pigs' language. `Let me out,' he'd say, `and I'll give yiz a silver
shilling.'

"`Pass it under the door,' I'd answer him. Thin he'd stick the snout of him undher the
door an' I'd hit it a clip with a stick, and he'd yell murther Irish. An' me mother'd come
out an' baste me, an' well I desarved it.

"Well, wan day I opened the sty door, an' out he boulted and away and beyant, over
hill and hollo he goes till he gets to the edge of the cliff overlookin' the say, and there
he meets a billy-goat, and he and the billy-goat has a division of opinion.

"`Away wid yiz!' says the billy-goat.

"`Away wid yourself!' says he.

"`Whose you talkin' to?' says t'other.

"`Yourself,' says him.

"`Who stole the eggs?' says the billy-goat.

"`Ax your ould grandmother!' says the pig.

"`Ax me ould WHICH mother?' says the billy-goat.

"`Oh, ax me—' And before he could complete the sintence, ram, blam, the ould
billygoat butts him in the chist, and away goes the both of thim whirtlin' into the say
below.

"Thin me ould grandfather comes out, and collars me by the scruff, and `Into the sty
with you!' says he; and into the sty I wint, and there they kep' me for a fortnit on bran
mash and skim milk—and well I desarved it."

They dined somewhere about eleven o'clock, and at noon Paddy unstepped the mast
and made a sort of little tent or awning with the sail in the bow of the boat to protect
the children from the rays of the vertical sun.

Then he took his place in the bottom of the boat, in the stern, stuck Dick's straw hat
over his face to preserve it from the sun, kicked about a bit to get a comfortable
position, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

"S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H"
He had slept an hour and more when he was brought to his senses by a thin and
prolonged shriek. It was Emmeline in a nightmare, or more properly a day-mare,
brought on by a meal of sardines and the haunting memory of the gibbly-gobbly-ums.
When she was shaken (it always took a considerable time to bring her to, from these
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seizures) and comforted, the mast was restepped.

As Mr Button stood with his hand on the spar looking round him before going aft with
the sheet, an object struck his eye some three miles ahead. Objects rather, for they
were the masts and spars of a small ship rising from the water. Not a vestige of sail,
just the naked spars. It might have been a couple of old skeleton trees jutting out of
the water for all a landsman could have told.

He stared at this sight for twenty or thirty seconds without speaking, his head
projected like the head of a tortoise. Then he gave a wild "Hurroo!"

"What is it, Paddy?" asked Dick.

"Hurroo!" replied Button. "Ship ahoy! ship ahoy! Lie to till I be afther boardin' you.
Sure, they are lyin' to—divil a rag of canvas on her—are they aslape or
dhramin'? Here, Dick, let me get aft wid the sheet; the wind'll take us up to her
quicker than we'll row."

He crawled aft and took the tiller; the breeze took the sail, and the boat forged ahead.

"Is it daddy's ship?" asked Dick, who was almost as excited as his friend.

"I dinno; we'll see when we fetch her."

"Shall we go on her, Mr Button?" asked Emmeline.

"Ay will we, honey."

Emmeline bent down, and fetching her parcel from under the seat, held it in her lap.

As they drew nearer, the outlines of the ship became more apparent. She was a small
brig, with stump topmasts, from the spars a few rags of canvas fluttered. It was
apparent soon to the old sailor's eye what was amiss with her.

"She's derelick, bad cess to her!" he muttered; "derelick and done for—just me
luck!"

I can't see any people on the ship," cried Dick, who had crept
forward to the bow. "Daddy's not there."

The old sailor let the boat off a point or two, so as to get a view of the brig more fully;
when they were within twenty cable lengths or so he unstepped the mast and took to
the sculls.

The little brig floated very low on the water, and presented a mournful enough
appearance; her running rigging all slack, shreds of canvas flapping at the yards, and
no boats hanging at her davits. It was easy enough to see that she was a timber ship,
and that she had started a butt, flooded herself and been abandoned.

Paddy lay on his oars within a few strokes of her. She was floating as placidly as
though she were in the harbour of San Francisco; the green water showed in her
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shadow, and in the green water waved the tropic weeds that were growing from her
copper. Her paint was blistered and burnt absolutely as though a hot iron had been
passed over it, and over her taffrail hung a large rope whose end was lost to sight in
the water.

A few strokes brought them under the stern. The name of the ship was there in faded
letters, also the port to which she belonged.

"Shenandoah. Martha's Vineyard."

"There's letters on her," said Mr Button. "But I can't make thim out. I've no larnin'."

"I can read them," said Dick.

"So c'n I," murmured Emmeline.

"S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H," spelt Dick.

"What's that?" enquired Paddy.

"I don't know," replied Dick, rather downcastedly.

"There you are!" cried the oarsman in a disgusted manner, pulling the boat round to
the starboard side of the brig. "They pritind to tache letters to childer in schools,
pickin' their eyes out wid book-readin', and here's letters as big as me face an' they
can't make hid or tail of them—be dashed to book-readin'!"

The brig had old-fashioned wide channels, regular platforms; and she floated so low in
the water that they were scarcely a foot above the level of the dinghy.

Mr Button secured the boat by passing the painter through a channel plate, then, with
Emmeline and her parcel in his arms or rather in one arm, he clambered over the
channel and passed her over the rail on to the deck. Then it was Dick's turn, and the
children stood waiting whilst the old sailor brought the beaker of water, the biscuit,
and the tinned stuff on board.

It was a place to delight the heart of a boy, the deck of the Shenandoah; forward right
from the main hatchway it was laden with timber. Running rigging lay loose on the
deck in coils, and nearly the whole of the quarter-deck was occupied by a deck-house.
The place had a delightful smell of sea-beach, decaying wood, tar, and mystery. Bights
of buntline and other ropes were dangling from above, only waiting to be swung from.
A bell was hung just forward of the foremast. In half a moment Dick was forward
hammering at the bell with a belaying pin he had picked from the deck.

Mr Button shouted to him to desist; the sound of the bell jarred on his nerves. It
sounded like a summons, and a summons on that deserted craft was quite out of place.
Who knew what mightn't answer it in the way of the supernatural?

Dick dropped the belaying pin and ran forward. He took the disengaged hand, and the
three went aft to the door of the deck-house. The door was open, and they peeped in.
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The place had three windows on the starboard side, and through the windows the sun
was shining in a mournful manner. There was a table in the middle of the place. A seat
was pushed away from the table as if someone had risen in a hurry. On the table lay
the remains of a meal, a teapot, two teacups, two plates. On one of the plates rested a
fork with a bit of putrifying bacon upon it that some one had evidently been conveying
to his mouth when something had happened. Near the teapot stood a tin of condensed
milk, haggled open. Some old salt had just been in the act of putting milk in his tea
when the mysterious something had occurred. Never did a lot of dead things speak so
eloquently as these things spoke.

One could conjure it all up. The skipper, most likely, had finished his tea, and the mate
was hard at work at his, when the leak had been discovered, or some derelict had
been run into, or whatever it was had happened—happened.

One thing was evident, that since the abandonment of the brig she had experienced
fine weather, else the things would not have been left standing so trimly on the table.

Mr Button and Dick entered the place to prosecute enquiries, but Emmeline remained
at the door. The charm of the old brig appealed to her almost as much as to Dick, but
she had a feeling about it quite unknown to him. A ship where no one was had about it
suggestions of "other things."

She was afraid to enter the gloomy deckhouse, and afraid to remain alone outside; she
compromised matters by sitting down on the deck. Then she placed the small bundle
beside her, and hurriedly took the rag-doll from her pocket, into which it was stuffed
head down, pulled its calico skirt from over its head, propped it up against the
coaming of the door, and told it not to be afraid.

There was not much to be found in the deck-house, but aft of it were two small cabins
like rabbit hutches, once inhabited by the skipper and his mate. Here there were great
findings in the way of rubbish. Old clothes, old boots, an old top-hat of that
extraordinary pattern you may see in the streets of Pernambuco, immensely tall, and
narrowing towards the brim. A telescope without a lens, a volume of Hoyt, a nautical
almanac, a great bolt of striped flannel shirting, a box of fish hooks. And in one
corner—glorious find!—a coil of what seemed to be ten yards or so of
black rope.

"Baccy, begorra!" shouted Pat, seizing upon his treasure. It was pigtail. You may see
coils of it in the tobacconists' windows of seaport towns. A pipe full of it would make a
hippopotamus vomit, yet old sailors chew it and smoke it and revel in it.

"We'll bring all the lot of the things out on deck, and see what's worth keepin' an'
what's worth leavin'," said Mr Button, taking an immense armful of the old truck;
whilst Dick, carrying the top-hat, upon which he had instantly seized as his own
special booty, led the way.

"Em," shouted Dick, as he emerged from the doorway, "see what I've got!"

He popped the awful-looking structure over his head. It went right down to his
shoulders.
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Emmeline gave a shriek.

"It smells funny," said Dick, taking it off and applying his nose to the inside of
it—"smells like an old hair brush. Here, you try it on."

Emmeline scrambled away as far as she could, till she reached the starboard
bulwarks, where she sat in the scupper, breathless and speechless and wide-eyed. She
was always dumb when frightened (unless it were a nightmare or a very sudden
shock), and this hat suddenly seen half covering Dick frightened her out of her wits.
Besides, it was a black thing, and she hated black things—black cats, black
horses; worst of all, black dogs.

She had once seen a hearse in the streets of Boston, an old-time hearse with black
plumes, trappings and all complete. The sight had nearly given her a fit, though she
did not know in the least the meaning of it.

Meanwhile Mr Button was conveying armful after armful of stuff on deck. When the
heap was complete, he sat down beside it in the glorious afternoon sunshine, and lit
his pipe.

He had searched neither for food or water as yet; content with the treasure God had
given him, for the moment the material things of life were forgotten. And, indeed, if he
had searched he would have found only half a sack of potatoes in the caboose, for the
lazarette was awash, and the water in the scuttle-butt was stinking.

Emmeline, seeing what was in progress, crept up, Dick promising not to put the hat on
her, and they all sat round the pile.

"Thim pair of brogues," said the old man, holding a pair of old boots up for inspection
like an auctioneer, "would fetch half a dollar any day in the wake in any sayport in the
world. Put them beside you, Dick, and lay hold of this pair of britches by the ends of
em'—stritch them."

The trousers were stretched out, examined and approved of, and laid beside the boots.

"Here's a tiliscope wid wan eye shut," said Mr Button, examining the broken telescope
and pulling it in and out like a concertina. "Stick it beside the brogues; it may come in
handy for somethin'. Here's a book"—tossing the nautical almanac to the boy.
"Tell me what it says."

Dick examined the pages of figures hopelessly.

"I can't read 'em," said Dick; "it's numbers."

"Buzz it overboard," said Mr Button.

Dick did what he was told joyfully, and the proceedings resumed.

He tried on the tall hat, and the children laughed. On her old friend's head the thing
ceased to have terror for Emmeline.
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She had two methods of laughing. The angelic smile before mentioned—a rare
thing—and, almost as rare, a laugh in which she showed her little white teeth,
whilst she pressed her hands together, the left one tight shut, and the right clasped
over it.

He put the hat on one side, and continued the sorting, searching all the pockets of the
clothes and finding nothing. When he had arranged what to keep, they flung the rest
overboard, and the valuables were conveyed to the captain's cabin, there to remain till
wanted.

Then the idea that food might turn up useful as well as old clothes in their present
condition struck the imaginative mind of Mr Button, and he proceeded to search.

The lazarette was simply a cistern full of sea water; what else it might contain, not
being a diver, he could not say. In the copper of the caboose lay a great lump of
putrifying pork or meat of some sort. The harness cask contained nothing except huge
crystals of salt. All the meat had been taken away. Still, the provisions and water
brought on board from the dinghy would be sufficient to last them some ten days or
so, and in the course of ten days a lot of things might happen.

Mr Button leaned over the side. The dinghy was nestling beside the brig like a
duckling beside a duck; the broad channel might have been likened to the duck's wing
half extended. He got on the channel to see if the painter was safely attached. Having
made all secure, he climbed slowly up to the main-yard arm, and looked round upon
the sea.

CHAPTER IX

SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT

"Daddy's a long time coming," said Dick all of a sudden.

They were seated on the baulks of timber that cumbered the deck of the brig on either
side of the caboose. An ideal perch. The sun was setting over Australia way, in a sea
that seemed like a sea of boiling gold. Some mystery of mirage caused the water to
heave and tremble as if troubled by fervent heat.

"Ay, is he," said Mr Button; "but it's better late than never. Now don't be thinkin' of
him, for that won't bring him. Look at the sun goin' into the wather, and don't be
spakin' a word, now, but listen and you'll hear it hiss."

The children gazed and listened, Paddy also. All three were mute as the great blazing
shield touched the water that leapt to meet it.

You COULD hear the water hiss—if you had imagination enough. Once having
touched the water, the sun went down behind it, as swiftly as a man in a hurry going
down a ladder. As he vanished a ghostly and golden twilight spread over the sea, a
light exquisite but immensely forlorn. Then the sea became a violet shadow, the west
darkened as if to a closing door, and the stars rushed over the sky.
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"Mr Button," said Emmeline, nodding towards the sun as he vanished, "where's over
there?"

"The west," replied he, staring at the sunset. "Chainy and Injee and all away beyant."

"Where's the sun gone to now, Paddy?" asked Dick.

"He's gone chasin' the moon, an' she's skedadlin' wid her dress brailed up for all she's
worth; she'll be along up in a minit. He's always afther her, but he's never caught her
yet."

"What would he do to her if he caught her?" asked Emmeline.

"Faith, an' maybe he'd fetch her a skelp an' well she'd desarve it."

"Why'd she deserve it?" asked Dick, who was in one of his questioning moods.

"Because she's always delutherin' people an' leadin' thim asthray. Girls or men, she
moidhers thim all once she gets the comeither on them; same as she did Buck
M'Cann."

"Who's he?"

"Buck M'Cann? Faith, he was the village ijit where I used to live in the ould days."

"What's that'"

"Hould your whisht, an' don't be axin' questions. He was always wantin' the moon,
though he was twinty an' six feet four. He'd a gob on him that hung open like a
rat-trap with a broken spring, and he was as thin as a barber's pole, you could a' tied a
reef knot in the middle of 'um; and whin the moon was full there was no houldin' him."
Mr Button gazed at the reflection of the sunset on the water for a moment as if
recalling some form from the past, and then proceeded. "He'd sit on the grass starin'
at her, an' thin he'd start to chase her over the hills, and they'd find him at last, maybe
a day or two later, lost in the mountains, grazin' on berries, and as green as a
cabbidge from the hunger an' the cowld, till it got so bad at long last they had to
hobble him."

"I've seen a donkey hobbled," cried Dick.

"Thin you've seen the twin brother of Buck M'Cann. Well, one night me elder brother
Tim was sittin' over the fire, smokin' his dudeen an' thinkin' of his sins, when in comes
Buck with the hobbles on him.

"`Tim,' says he, `I've got her at last!'

"`Got who?' says Tim.

"`The moon,' says he.

"`Got her where?' says Tim.

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"`In a bucket down by the pond,' says t'other, `safe an' sound an' not a scratch on her;
you come and look,' says he. So Tim follows him, he hobblin', and they goes to the
pond side, and there, sure enough, stood a tin bucket full of wather, an' on the wather
the refliction of the moon.

"`I dridged her out of the pond,' whispers Buck. `Aisy now,' says he, `an' I'll dribble
the water out gently,' says he, `an' we'll catch her alive at the bottom of it like a trout.'
So he drains the wather out gently of the bucket till it was near all gone, an' then he
looks into the bucket expectin' to find the moon flounderin' in the bottom of it like a
flat fish.

"`She's gone, bad 'cess to her!' says he.

"`Try again,' says me brother, and Buck fills the bucket again, and there was the moon
sure enough when the water came to stand still.

"`Go on,' says me brother. `Drain out the wather, but go gentle, or she'll give yiz the
slip again.'

"`Wan minit,' says Buck, `I've got an idea,' says he; `she won't give me the slip this
time,' says he. `You wait for me,' says he; and off he hobbles to his old mother's cabin
a stone's-throw away, and back he comes with a sieve.

"`You hold the sieve,' says Buck, `and I'll drain the water into it; if she 'scapes from
the bucket we'll have her in the sieve.' And he pours the wather out of the bucket as
gentle as if it was crame out of a jug. When all the wather was out he turns the bucket
bottom up, and shook it.

"`Ran dan the thing!' he cries, `she's gone again'; an' wid that he flings the bucket into
the pond, and the sieve afther the bucket, when up comes his old mother hobbling on
her stick.

"`Where's me bucket?' says she.

"`In the pond,' say Buck.

"`And me sieve?' says she.

"`Gone afther the bucket.'

"`I'll give yiz a bucketin!' says she; and she up with the stick and landed him a skelp,
an' driv him roarin' and hobblin' before her, and locked him up in the cabin, an' kep'
him on bread an' wather for a wake to get the moon out of his head; but she might
have saved her thruble, for that day month in it was agin.… There she comes!"

The moon, argent and splendid, was breaking from the water. She was full, and her
light was powerful almost as the light of day. The shadows of the children and the
queer shadow of Mr Button were cast on the wall of the caboose hard and black as
silhouettes.
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"Look at our shadows!" cried Dick, taking off his broad-brimmed straw hat and waving
it.

Emmeline held up her doll to see ITS shadow, and Mr Button held up his pipe.

"Come now," said he, putting the pipe back in his mouth, and making to rise, "and
shadda off to bed; it's time you were aslape, the both of you."

Dick began to yowl.

"I don't want to go to bed; I aint tired, Paddy—les's stay a little longer."

"Not a minit," said the other, with all the decision of a nurse; "not a minit afther me
pipe's out!"

"Fill it again," said Dick.

Mr Button made no reply. The pipe gurgled as he puffed at it—a kind of

death-rattle speaking of almost immediate extinction.

"Mr Button!" said Emmeline. She was holding her nose in the air and sniffing; seated
to windward of the smoker, and out of the pigtail-poisoned air, her delicate sense of
smell perceived something lost to the others.

"What is it, acushla?"

"I smell something."

"What d'ye say you smell?"

"Something nice."

"What's it like?" asked Dick, sniffing hard. "I don't smell anything."

Emmeline sniffed again to make sure.

"Flowers," said she.

The breeze, which had shifted several points since midday, was bearing with it a faint,
faint odour: a perfume of vanilla and spice so faint as to be imperceptible to all but the
most acute olfactory sense.

"Flowers!" said the old sailor, tapping the ashes cut of his pipe against the heel of his
boot. "And where'd you get flowers in middle of the say? It's dhramin' you are. Come
now—to bed wid yiz!"

"Fill it again," wailed Dick, referring to the pipe.

"It's a spankin' I'll give you," replied his guardian, lifting him down from the timber
baulks, and then assisting Emmeline, "in two ticks if you don't behave. Come along,
Em'line."
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He started aft, a small hand in each of his, Dick bellowing.

As they passed the ship's bell, Dick stretched towards the belaying pin that was still
lying on the deck, seized it, and hit the bell a mighty bang. It was the last pleasure to
be snatched before sleep, and he snatched it.

Paddy had made up beds for himself and his charges in the deck-house; he had
cleared the stuff off the table, broken open the windows to get the musty smell away,
and placed the mattresses from the captain and mate's cabins on the floor.

When the children were in bed and asleep, he went to the starboard rail, and, leaning
on it, looked over the moonlit sea. He was thinking of ships as his wandering eye
roved over the sea spaces, little dreaming of the message that the perfumed breeze
was bearing him. The message that had been received and dimly understood by
Emmeline. Then he leaned with his back to the rail and his hands in his pockets. He
was not thinking now, he was ruminating.

The basis of the Irish character as exemplified by Paddy Button is a profound laziness
mixed with a profound melancholy. Yet Paddy, in his left-handed way, was as hard a
worker as any man on board ship; and as for melancholy, he was the life and soul of
the fo'cs'le. Yet there they were, the laziness and the melancholy, only waiting to be
tapped.

As he stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, longshore fashion, counting the
dowels in the planking of the deck by the moonlight, he was reviewing the "old days."
The tale of Buck M'Cann had recalled them, and across all the salt seas he could see
the moonlight on the Connemara mountains, and hear the seagulls crying on the
thunderous beach where each wave has behind it three thousand miles of sea.

Suddenly Mr Button came back from the mountains of Connemara to find himself on
the deck of the Shenandoah; and he instantly became possessed by fears. Beyond the
white deserted deck, barred by the shadows of the standing rigging, he could see the
door of the caboose. Suppose he should suddenly see a head pop out or, worse, a
shadowy form go in?

He turned to the deck-house, where the children were sound asleep, and where, in a
few minutes, he, too, was sound asleep beside them, whilst all night long the brig
rocked to the gentle swell of the Pacific, and the breeze blew, bringing with it the
perfume of flowers.

CHAPTER X

THE TRAGEDY OF THE BOATS

When the fog lifted after midnight the people in the long-boat saw the quarter-boat
half a mile to starboard of them.

"Can you see the dinghy?" asked Lestrange of the captain, who was standing up
searching the horizon.
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"Not a speck," answered Le Farge. "DAMN that Irishman! but for him I'd have got the
boats away properly victualled and all; as it is I don't know what we've got aboard.
You, Jenkins, what have you got forward there?"

"Two bags of bread and a breaker of water," answered the steward.

"A breaker of water be sugared!" came another voice; "a breaker half full, you mean."

Then the steward's voice: "So it is; there's not more than a couple of gallons in her."

"My God!" said Le Farge. "DAMN that Irishman!"

"There's not more than'll give us two half pannikins apiece all round," said the
steward.

"Maybe," said Le Farge, "the quarter-boat's better stocked; pull for her."

"She's pulling for us," said the stroke oar.

"Captain," asked Lestrange, "are you sure there's no sight of the dinghy?"

"None," replied Le Farge.

The unfortunate man's head sank on his breast. He had little time to brood over his
troubles, however, for a tragedy was beginning to unfold around him, the most
shocking, perhaps, in the annals of the sea—a tragedy to be hinted at rather
than spoken of.

When the boats were within hailing distance, a man in the bow of the long-boat rose
up.

"Quarter-boat ahoy!"

"Ahoy!"

"How much water have you?"

"None!"

The word came floating over the placid moonlit water. At it the fellows in the long-boat
ceased rowing, and you could see the water-drops dripping off their oars like
diamonds in the moonlight.

"Quarter-boat, ahoy!" shouted the fellow in the bow. "Lay on your oars."

"Here, you scowbanker!" cried Le Farge, "who are you to be giving

directions—"

"Scowbanker yourself!" replied the fellow. "Bullies, put her about!"

The starboard oars backed water, and the boat came round.
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By chance the worst lot of the Northumberland's crew were in the long-boat
veritable—"scowbankers" scum; and how scum clings to life you will never
know, until you have been amongst it in an open boat at sea. Le Farge had no more
command over this lot than you have who are reading this book.

"Heave to!" came from the quarter-boat, as she laboured behind.

"Lay on your oars, bullies!" cried the ruffian at the bow, who was still standing up like
an evil genius who had taken momentary command over events. "Lay on your oars,
bullies; they'd better have it now."

The quarter-boat in her turn ceased rowing, and lay a cable's length away.

"How much water have you?" came the mate's voice.

"Not enough to go round."

Le Farge made to rise, and the stroke oar struck at him, catching him in the wind and
doubling him up in the bottom of the boat.

"Give us some, for God's sake!" came the mate's voice; "we're parched with rowing,
and there's a woman on board!"

The fellow in the bow of the long-boat, as if someone had suddenly struck him, broke
into a tornado of blasphemy.

"Give us some," came the mate's voice, "or, by God, we'll lay you aboard!"

Before the words were well spoken the men in the quarter-boat carried the threat into
action. The conflict was brief: the quarter-boat was too crowded for fighting. The
starboard men in the long-boat fought with their oars, whilst the fellows to port
steadied the boat.

The fight did not last long, and presently the quarter-boat sheered off, half of the men
in her cut about the head and bleeding—two of them senseless.

It was sundown on the following day. The long-boat lay adrift. The last drop of water
had been served out eight hours before.

The quarter-boat, like a horrible phantom, had been haunting and pursuing her all
day, begging for water when there was none. It was like the prayers one might expect
to hear in hell.

The men in the long-boat, gloomy and morose, weighed down with a sense of crime,
tortured by thirst, and tormented by the voices imploring for water, lay on their oars
when the other boat tried to approach.

Now and then, suddenly, and as if moved by a common impulse, they would all shout
out together: "We have none." But the quarter-boat would not believe. It was in vain to
hold the breaker with the bung out to prove its dryness, the half-delirious creatures
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had it fixed in their minds that their comrades were withholding from them the water
that was not.

Just as the sun touched the sea, Lestrange, rousing himself from a torpor into which
he had sunk, raised himself and looked over the gunwale. He saw the quarter-boat
drifting a cable's length away, lit by the full light of sunset, and the spectres in it,
seeing him, held out in mute appeal their blackened tongues.

Of the night that followed it is almost impossible to speak. Thirst was nothing to what
the scowbankers suffered from the torture of the whimpering appeal for water that
came to them at intervals during the night.

When at last the Arago, a French whale ship, sighted them, the crew of the long-boat
were still alive, but three of them were raving madmen. Of the crew of the
quarter-boat was saved not one.

PART II

CHAPTER XI

THE ISLAND
"Childer!" shouted Paddy. He was at the cross-trees in the full dawn, whilst the
children standing beneath on deck were craning their faces up to him. "There's an
island forenint us."

"Hurrah!" cried Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like in the
concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy's voice was jubilant.

"Land ho! it is," said he, coming down to the deck. "Come for'ard to the bows, and I'll
show it you."

He stood on the timber in the bows and lifted Emmeline up in his arms; and even at
that humble elevation from the water she could see something of an undecided
colour—green for choice—on the horizon.

It was not directly ahead, but on the starboard bow—or, as she would have
expressed it, to the right. When Dick had looked and expressed his disappointment at
there being so little to see, Paddy began to make preparations for leaving the ship.

It was only just now, with land in sight, that he recognised in some fashion the horror
of the position from which they were about to escape.

He fed the children hurriedly with some biscuits and tinned meat, and then, with a
biscuit in his hand, eating as he went, he trotted about the decks, collecting things and
stowing them in the dinghy. The bolt of striped flannel, all the old clothes, a housewife
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full of needles and thread, such as seamen sometimes carry, the half-sack of potatoes,
a saw which he found in the caboose, the precious coil of tobacco, and a lot of other
odds and ends he transhipped, sinking the little dinghy several strakes in the process.
Also, of course, he took the breaker of water, and the remains of the biscuit and tinned
stuff they had brought on board. These being stowed, and the dinghy ready, he went
forward with the children to the bow, to see how the island was bearing.

It had loomed up nearer during the hour or so in which he had been collecting and
storing the things—nearer, and more to the right, which meant that the brig
was being borne by a fairly swift current, and that she would pass it, leaving it two or
three miles to starboard. It was well they had command of the dinghy.

"The sea's all round it," said Emmeline, who was seated on Paddy's shoulder, holding
on tight to him, and gazing upon the island, the green of whose trees was now visible,
an oasis of verdure in the sparkling and seraphic blue.

"Are we going there, Paddy?" asked Dick, holding on to a stay, and straining his eyes
towards the land.

"Ay, are we," said Mr Button. "Hot foot—five knots, if we're makin' wan; and it's
ashore we'll be by noon, and maybe sooner."

The breeze had freshened up, and was blowing dead from the island, as though the
island were making a weak attempt to blow them away from it.

Oh, what a fresh and perfumed breeze it was! All sorts of tropical growing things had
joined their scent in one bouquet.

"Smell it," said Emmeline, expanding her small nostrils. "That's what I smelt last night,
only it's stronger now."

The last reckoning taken on board the Northumberland had proved the ship to be
south by east of the Marquesas; this was evidently one of those small, lost islands that
lie here and there south by east of the Marquesas. Islands the most lonely and
beautiful in the world.

As they gazed it grew before them, and shifted still more to the right. It was hilly and
green now, though the trees could not be clearly made out; here, the green was
lighter in colour, and there, darker. A rim of pure white marble seemed to surround its
base. It was foam breaking on the barrier reef.

In another hour the feathery foliage of the cocoanut palms could be made out, and the
old sailor judged it time to take to the boat.

He lifted Emmeline, who was clasping her luggage, over the rail on to the channel,
and deposited her in the sternsheets; then Dick.

In a moment the boat was adrift, the mast steeped, and the Shenandoah left to pursue
her mysterious voyage at the will of the currents of the sea.
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"You're not going to the island, Paddy," cried Dick, as the old man put the boat on the
port tack.

"You be aisy," replied the other, "and don't be larnin' your gran'mother. How the divil
d'ye think I'd fetch the land sailin' dead in the wind's eye?"

"Has the wind eyes?"

Mr Button did not answer the question. He was troubled in his mind. What if the
island were inhabited? He had spent several years in the South Seas. He knew the
people of the Marquesas and Samoa, and liked them. But here he was out of his
bearings.

However, all the troubling in the world was of no use. It was a case of the island or the
deep sea, and, putting the boat on the starboard tack, he lit his pipe and leaned back
with the tiller in the crook of his arm. His keen eyes had made out from the deck of the
brig an opening in the reef, and he was making to run the dinghy abreast of the
opening, and then take to the sculls and row her through.

Now, as they drew nearer, a sound came on the breeze—sound faint and
sonorous and dreamy. It was the sound of the breakers on the reef. The sea just here
was heaving to a deeper swell, as if vexed in its sleep at the resistance to it of the
land.

Emmeline, sitting with her bundle in her lap, stared without speaking at the sight
before her. Even in the bright, glorious sunshine, and despite the greenery that
showed beyond, it was a desolate sight seen from her place in the dinghy. A white,
forlorn beach, over which the breakers raced and tumbled, seagulls wheeling and
screaming, and over all the thunder of the surf.

Suddenly the break became visible, and a glimpse of smooth, blue water beyond.
Button unshipped the tiller, unstepped the mast, and took to the sculls.

As they drew nearer, the sea became more active, savage, and alive; the thunder of
the surf became louder, the breakers more fierce and threatening, the opening
broader.

One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into
the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the
sculls could have driven it. Sea-gulls screamed around them, the boat rocked and
swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut her eyes TIGHT.

Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf
became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and
found herself in Wonderland.
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CHAPTER XII

THE LAKE OF AZURE

On either side lay a great sweep of waving blue water. Calm, almost as a lake,
sapphire here, and here with the tints of the aquamarine. Water so clear that fathoms
away below you could see the branching coral, the schools of passing fish, and the
shadows of the fish upon the spaces of sand.

Before them the clear water washed the sands of a white beach, the cocoa-palms
waved and whispered in the breeze; and as the oarsman lay on his oars to look a flock
of bluebirds rose, as if suddenly freed from the treetops, wheeled, and passed
soundless, like a wreath of smoke, over the tree-tops of the higher land beyond.

"Look!" shouted Dick, who had his nose over the of the boat. "Look at the FISH!"

"Mr Button," cried Emmeline, "where are we?"

"Bedad, I dunno; but we might be in a worse place, I'm thinkin'," replied the old man,
sweeping his eyes over the blue and tranquil lagoon, from the barrier reef to the
happy shore.

On either side of the broad beach before them the cocoa-nut trees came down like two
regiments, and bending gazed at their own reflections in the lagoon. Beyond lay
waving chapparel, where cocoa-palms and breadfruit trees intermixed with the
mammee apple and the tendrils of the wild vine. On one of the piers of coral at the
break of the reef stood a single cocoa-palm; bending with a slight curve, it, too,
seemed seeking its reflection in the waving water.

But the soul of it all, the indescribable thing about this picture of mirrored palm trees,
blue lagoon, coral reef and sky, was the light.

Away at sea the light was blinding, dazzling, cruel. Away at sea it had nothing to focus
itself upon, nothing to exhibit but infinite spaces of blue water and desolation.

Here it made the air a crystal, through which the gazer saw the loveliness of the land
and reef, the green of palm, the white of coral, the wheeling gulls, the blue lagoon, all
sharply outlined—burning, coloured, arrogant, yet
tender—heart-breakingly beautiful, for the spirit of eternal morning was here,
eternal happiness, eternal youth.

As the oarsman pulled the tiny craft towards the beach, neither he nor the children
saw away behind the boat, on the water near the bending palm tree at the break in the
reef, something that for a moment insulted the day, and was gone. Something like a
small triangle of dark canvas, that rippled through the water and sank from sight;
something that appeared and vanished like an evil thought.

It did not take long to beach the boat. Mr Button tumbled over the side up to his knees
in water, whilst Dick crawled over the bow.
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"Catch hould of her the same as I do," cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard
gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale to port. Now then:

"Yeo ho, Chilliman,

Up wid her, up wid her,
Heave O, Chilliman.'

"Lave her be now; she's high enough."

He took Emmeline in his arms and carried her up on the sand. It was from just here on
the sand that you could see the true beauty of the lagoon. That lake of sea-water
forever protected from storm and trouble by the barrier reef of coral.

Right from where the little clear ripples ran up the strand, it led the eye to the break
in the coral reef where the palm gazed at its own reflection in the water, and there,
beyond the break, one caught a vision of the great heaving, sparkling sea.

The lagoon, just here, was perhaps more than a third of a mile broad. I have never
measured it, but I. know that, standing by the palm tree on the reef, flinging up one's
arm and shouting to a person on the beach, the sound took a perceptible time to cross
the water: I should say, perhaps, an almost perceptible time. The distant signal and
the distant call were almost coincident, yet not quite.

Dick, mad with delight at the place in which he found himself, was running about like
a dog just out of the water. Mr Button was discharging the cargo of the dinghy on the
dry, white sand. Emmeline seated herself with her precious bundle on the sand, and
was watching the operations of her friend, looking at the things around her and
feeling very strange.

For all she knew all this was the ordinary accompaniment of a sea voyage. Paddy's
manner throughout had been set to the one idea, not to frighten the "childer"; the
weather had backed him up. But down in the heart of her lay the knowledge that all
was not as it should be. The hurried departure from the ship, the fog in which her
uncle had vanished, those things, and others as well, she felt instinctively were not
right. But she said nothing.

She had not long for meditation, however, for Dick was running towards her with a
live crab which he had picked up, calling out that he was going to make it bite her.

"Take it away!" cried Emmeline, holding both hands with fingers widespread in front
of her face. "Mr Button! Mr Button! Mr Button!"

"Lave her be, you little divil!" roared Pat, who was depositing the last of the cargo on
the sand. "Lave her be, or it's a cow-hidin' I'll be givin' you!"

"What's a `divil,' Paddy?" asked Dick, panting from his exertions. "Paddy, what's a
`divil'?"

"You're wan. Ax no questions now, for it's tired I am, an' I want to rest me bones."
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He flung himself under the shade of a palm tree, took out his tinder box, tobacco and
pipe, cut some tobacco up, filled his pipe and lit it. Emmeline crawled up, and sat near
him, and Dick flung himself down on the sand near Emmeline.

Mr Button took off his coat and made a pillow of it against a cocoa-nut tree stem. He
had found the El Dorado of the weary. With his knowledge of the South Seas a glance
at the vegetation to be seen told him that food for a regiment might be had for the
taking; water, too.

Right down the middle of the strand was a depression which in the rainy season would
be the bed of a rushing rivulet. The water just now was not strong enough to come all
the way to the lagoon, but away up there "beyant" in the woods lay the source, and
he'd find it in due time. There was enough in the breaker for a week, and green
"cucanuts" were to be had for the climbing.

Emmeline contemplated Paddy for a while as he smoked and rested his bones, then a
great thought occurred to her. She took the little shawl from around the parcel she
was holding and exposed the mysterious box.

"Oh, begorra, the box!" said Paddy, leaning on his elbow interestedly; "I might a'
known you wouldn't a' forgot it."

"Mrs James," said Emmeline, "made me promise not to open it till I got on shore, for
the things in it might get lost."

"Well, you're ashore now," said Dick; "open it."

"I'm going to," said Emmeline.

She carefully undid the string, refusing the assistance of Paddy's knife. Then the
brown paper came off, disclosing a common cardboard box. She raised the lid half an
inch, peeped in, and shut it again.

"OPEN it!" cried Dick, mad with curiosity.

"What's in it, honey?" asked the old sailor, who was as interested as Dick.

"Things," replied Emmeline.

Then all at once she took the lid off and disclosed a tiny tea service of china, packed in
shavings; there was a teapot with a lid, a cream jug, cups and saucers, and six
microscopic plates, each painted with a pansy.

"Sure, it's a tay-set!" said Paddy, in an interested voice. "Glory be to God! will you look
at the little plates wid the flowers on thim?"

"Heugh!" said Dick in disgust; "I thought it might a' been soldiers."

"I don't want soldiers," replied Emmeline, in a voice of perfect contentment.

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She unfolded a piece of tissue paper, and took from it a sugar-tongs and six spoons.
Then she arrayed the whole lot on the sand.

"Well, if that don't beat all!" said Paddy.

"And whin are you goin' to ax me to tay with you?"

"Some time," replied Emmeline, collecting the things, and carefully repacking them.

Mr Button finished his pipe, tapped the ashes out, and placed it in his pocket.

"I'll be afther riggin' up a bit of a tint," said he, as he rose to his feet, "to shelter us
from the jew to-night; but I'll first have a look at the woods to see if I can find wather.
Lave your box with the other things, Emmeline; there's no one here to take it."

Emmeline left her box on the heap of things that Paddy had placed in the shadow of
the cocoa-nut trees, took his hand, and the three entered the grove on the right.

It was like entering a pine forest; the tall symmetrical stems of the trees seemed set
by mathematical law, each at a given distance from the other. Whichever way you
entered a twilight alley set with tree boles lay before you. Looking up you saw at an
immense distance above a pale green roof patined with sparkling and flashing points
of light, where the breeze was busy playing with the green fronds of the trees.

"Mr Button," murmured Emmeline, "we won't get lost, will we?"

"Lost! No, faith; sure we're goin' uphill, an' all we have to do is to come down again,
when we want to get back—'ware nuts!" A green nut detached from up above
came down rattling and tumbling and hopped on the ground. Paddy picked it up. "It's
a green cucanut," said he, putting it in his pocket (it was not very much bigger than a
Jaffa orange), "and we'll have it for tay."

"That's not a cocoa-nut," said Dick; "coco-anuts are brown. I had five cents once an' I
bought one, and scraped it out and y'et it."

"When Dr. Sims made Dicky sick," said Emmeline, "he said the wonder t'im was how
Dicky held it all."

"Come on," said Mr Button, "an' don't be talkin', or it's the Cluricaunes will be after
us."

"What's cluricaunes?" demanded Dick.

"Little men no bigger than your thumb that make the brogues for the Good People."

"Who's they?"

"Whisht, and don't be talkin'. Mind your head, Em'leen, or the branches'll be hittin'
you in the face."
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They had left the cocoa-nut grove, and entered the chapparel. Here was a deeper
twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade. The artu with its
delicately diamonded trunk, the great bread-fruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a
cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes
of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of
wonderful flowers, from the orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus,
made beautiful the gloom.

Suddenly Mr Button stopped.

"Whisht!" said he.

Through the silence—a silence filled with the hum and the murmur of wood
insects and the faint, far song of the reef—came a tinkling, rippling sound: it
was water. He listened to make sure of the bearing of the sound, then he made for it.

Next moment they found themselves in a little grass-grown glade. From the hilly
ground above, over a rock black and polished like ebony, fell a tiny cascade not much
broader than one's hand; ferns grew around and from a tree above a great rope of
wild convolvulus flowers blew their trumpets in the enchanted twilight.

The children cried out at the prettiness of it, and Emmeline ran and dabbled her hands
in the water. Just above the little waterfall sprang a banana tree laden with fruit; it
had immense leaves six feet long and more, and broad as a dinner-table. One could
see the golden glint of the ripe fruit through the foliage.

In a moment Mr Button had kicked off his shoes and was going up the rock like a cat,
absolutely, for it seemed to give him nothing to climb by.

"Hurroo!" cried Dick in admiration. "Look at Paddy!"

Emmeline looked, and saw nothing but swaying leaves.

"Stand from under!" he shouted, and next moment down came a huge bunch of
yellow-jacketed bananas. Dick shouted with delight, but Emmeline showed no
excitement: she had discovered something.

CHAPTER XIII

DEATH VEILED WITH LICHEN

"Mr Button," said she, when the latter had descended, "there's a little barrel"; she
pointed to something green and lichen-covered that lay between the trunks of two
trees—something that eyes less sharp than the eyes of a child might have
mistaken for a boulder.

"Sure, an' faith it's an' ould empty bar'l," said Button, wiping the sweat from his brow
and staring at the thing. "Some ship must have been wathering here an' forgot it. It'll
do for a sate whilst we have dinner."
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He sat down upon it and distributed the bananas to the children, who sat down on the
grass.

The barrel looked such a deserted and neglected thing that his imagination assumed it
to be empty. Empty or full, however, it made an excellent seat, for it was quarter sunk
in the green soft earth, and immovable.

"If ships has been here, ships will come again," said he, as he munched his bananas.

"Will daddy's ship come here?" asked Dick.

"Ay, to be sure it will," replied the other, taking out his pipe. "Now run about and play
with the flowers an' lave me alone to smoke a pipe, and then we'll all go to the top of
the hill beyant, and have a look round us.

"Come 'long, Em!" cried Dick; and the children started off amongst the trees, Dick
pulling at the hanging vine tendrils, and Emmeline plucking what blossoms she could
find within her small reach.

When he had finished his pipe he hallooed, and small voices answered him from the
wood. Then the children came running back, Emmeline laughing and showing her
small white teeth, a large bunch of blossoms in her hand; Dick flowerless, but carrying
what seemed a large green stone.

"Look at what a funny thing I've found!" he cried; "it's got holes in it."

"Dhrap it!" shouted Mr Button, springing from the barrel as if someone had stuck an
awl into him. "Where'd you find it? What d'you mane by touchin' it? Give it here."

He took it gingerly in his hands; it was a lichen-covered skull, with a great dent in the
back of it where it had been cloven by an axe or some sharp instrument. He hove it as
far as he could away amidst the trees.

"What is it, Paddy?" asked Dick, half astonished, half frightened at the old man's
manner.

"It's nothin' good," replied Mr Button.

"There were two others, and I wanted to fetch them," grumbled Dick.

"You lave them alone. Musha! musha! but there's been black doin's here in days gone
by. What is it, Emmeline?"

Emmeline was holding out her bunch of flowers for admiration. He took a great gaudy
blossom—if flowers can ever be called gaudy—and stuck its stalk in the
pocket of his coat. Then he led the way uphill, muttering as he went.

The higher they got, the less dense became the trees and the fewer the cocoa-nut
palms. The cocoa-nut palm loves the sea, and the few they had here all had their heads
bent in the direction of the lagoon, as if yearning after it.
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They passed a cane-brake where canes twenty feet high whispered together like
bulrushes. Then a sunlit sward, destitute of tree or shrub, led them sharply upward for
a hundred feet or so to where a great rock, the highest point of the island, stood,
casting its shadow in the sunshine. The rock was about twenty feet high, and easy to
climb. Its top was almost flat, and as spacious as an ordinary dinner-table. From it one
could obtain a complete view of the island and the sea.

Looking down, one's eye travelled over the trembling and waving tree-tops, to the
lagoon; beyond the lagoon to the reef, beyond the reef to the infinite-space of the
Pacific. The reef encircled the whole island, here further from the land, here closer;
the song of the surf on it came as a whisper, just like the whisper you hear in a shell;
but, a strange thing, though the sound heard on the beach was continuous, up here
one could distinguish an intermittency as breaker after breaker dashed itself to death
on the coral strand below.

You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind, just so from the hill-top
you could see the wind in its passage over the sunlit foliage beneath.

It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-palm, artu and
breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry wind.

So bright and moving was the picture of the breeze-swept sea, the blue lagoon, the
foam-dashed reef, and the rocking trees that one felt one had surprised some
mysterious gala day, some festival of Nature more than ordinarily glad.

As if to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would burst what seemed a
rocket of coloured stars. The stars would drift away in a flock on the wind and be lost.
They were flights of birds. All-coloured birds peopled the trees below blue, scarlet,
dove-coloured, bright of eye, but voiceless. From the reef you could see occasionally
the seagulls rising here and there in clouds like small puffs of smoke.

The lagoon, here deep, here shallow, presented, according to its depth or shallowness,
the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The broadest parts were the palest, because the
most shallow; and here and there, in the shallows, you might see a faint tracery of
coral ribs almost reaching the surface. The island at its broadest might have been
three miles across. There was not a sign of house or habitation to be seen, and not a
sail on the whole of the wide Pacific.

It was a strange place to be, up here. To find oneself surrounded by grass and flowers
and trees, and all the kindliness of nature, to feel the breeze blow, to smoke one's
pipe, and to remember that one was in a place uninhabited and unknown. A place to
which no messages were ever carried except by the wind or the seagulls.

In this solitude the beetle was as carefully painted and the flower as carefully tended
as though all the peoples of the civilised world were standing by to criticise or
approve.

Nowhere in the world, perhaps, so well as here, could you appreciate Nature's
splendid indifference to the great affairs of Man.
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The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed on a small and
almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the sou'-sou'-west. It was no doubt
another island almost hull-down on the horizon. Save for this blemish the whole wheel
of the sea was empty and serene.

Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock. She had gone botanising where some
bushes displayed great bunches of the crimson arita berries as if to show to the sun
what Earth could do in the way of manufacturing poison. She plucked two great
bunches of them, and with this treasure came to the base of the rock.

"Lave thim berries down!" cried Mr Button, when she had attracted his attention.
"Don't put thim in your mouth; thim's the never-wake-up berries."

He came down off the rock, hand over fist, flung the poisonous things away, and
looked into Emmeline's small mouth, which at his command she opened wide. There
was only a little pink tongue in it, however, curled up like a rose-leaf; no sign of
berries or poison. So, giving her a little shake, just as a nursemaid would have done in
like circumstances, he took Dick off the rock, and led the way back to the beach.

CHAPTER XIV

ECHOES OF FAIRY-LAND
"Mr Buttons," said Emmeline that night, as they sat on the sand near the tent he had
improvised, "Mr Button—cats go to sleep."

They had been questioning him about the "never-wake-up" berries.

"Who said they didn't?" asked Mr Button.

"I mean," said Emmeline, "they go to sleep and never wake up again. Ours did. It had
stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings all down its tail. It went asleep in the
garden, all stretched out, and showing its teeth; an' I told Jane, and Dicky ran in an'
told uncle. I went to Mrs Sims, the doctor's wife, to tea; and when I came back I asked
Jane where pussy was and she said it was deadn' berried, but I wasn't to tell uncle."

"I remember," said Dick. "It was the day I went to the circus, and you told me not to
tell daddy the cat was deadn' berried. But I told Mrs James's man when he came to do
the garden; and I asked him where cats went when they were deadn' berried, and he
said he guessed they went to hell—at least he hoped they did, for they were
always scratchin' up the flowers. Then he told me not to tell anyone he'd said that, for
it was a swear word, and he oughtn't to have said it. I asked him what he'd give me if I
didn't tell, an' he gave me five cents. That was the day I bought the cocoa-nut."

The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree branch, which Mr
Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the staysail he had brought from the brig,
was pitched in the centre of the beach, so as to be out of the way of falling cocoa-nuts,
should the breeze strengthen during the night. The sun had set, but the moon had not
yet risen as they sat in the starlight on the sand near the temporary abode.
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"What's the things you said made the boots for the people, Paddy?" asked Dick, after a
pause.

"Which things?"

"You said in the wood I wasn't to talk, else—"

"Oh, the Cluricaunes—the little men that cobbles the Good People's brogues. Is
it them you mane?"

"Yes," said Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he meant, but
anxious for information that he felt would be curious. "And what are the good people?"

"Sure, where were you born and bred that you don't know the Good People is the
other name for the fairies—savin' their presence?"

"There aren't any," replied Dick. "Mrs Sims said there weren't."

"Mrs James," put in Emmeline, "said there were. She said she liked to see children
b'lieve in fairies. She was talking to another lady, who'd got a red feather in her
bonnet, and a fur muff. They were having tea, and I was sitting on the hearthrug. She
said the world was getting too—something or another, an' then the other lady
said it was, and asked Mrs James did she see Mrs Someone in the awful hat she wore
Thanksgiving Day. They didn't say anything more about fairies, but Mrs
James—"

"Whether you b'lave in them or not," said Paddy, "there they are. An' maybe they're
poppin' out of the wood behint us now, an' listenin' to us talkin'; though I'm doubtful if
there's any in these parts, though down in Connaught they were as thick as
blackberries in the ould days. O musha! musha! The ould days, the ould days! when
will I be seein' thim again? Now, you may b'lave me or b'lave me not, but me own ould
father—God rest his sowl! was comin' over Croagh Patrick one night before
Christmas with a bottle of whisky in one hand of him, and a goose, plucked an' claned
an' all, in the other, which same he'd won in a lottery, when, hearin' a tchune no
louder than the buzzin' of a bee, over a furze-bush he peeps, and there, round a big
white stone, the Good People were dancing in a ring hand in hand, an' kickin' their
heels, an' the eyes of them glowin' like the eyes of moths; and a chap on the stone, no
bigger than the joint of your thumb, playin' to thim on a bagpipes. Wid that he let wan
yell an' drops the goose an' makes for home, over hedge an' ditch, boundin' like a buck
kangaroo, an' the face on him as white as flour when he burst in through the door,
where we was all sittin' round the fire burnin' chestnuts to see who'd be married the
first.

"`An' what in the name of the saints is the mather wid yiz?' says me mother.

"`I've sane the Good People,' says he, `up on the field beyant,' says he; `and they've
got the goose,' says he, `but, begorra, I've saved the bottle,' he says. `Dhraw the cork
and give me a taste of it, for me heart's in me throat, and me tongue's like a brick-kil.'

"An' whin we come to prize the cork out of the bottle, there was nothin' in it; an' whin
we went next marnin' to look for the goose, it was gone. But there was the stone, sure
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enough, and the marks on it of the little brogues of the chap that'd played the
bagpipes and who'd be doubtin' there were fairies after that?"

The children said nothing for a while, and then Dick said:

"Tell us about Cluricaunes, and how they make the boots."

"Whin I'm tellin' you about Cluricaunes," said Mr Button, "it's the truth I'm tellin' you,
an' out of me own knowlidge, for I've spoke to a man that's held wan in his hand; he
was me own mother's brother, Con Cogan—rest his sowl! Con was six fut two,
wid a long, white face; he'd had his head bashed in, years before I was barn, in some
ruction or other, an' the docthers had japanned him with a five-shillin' piece beat flat."

Dick interposed with a question as to the process, aim, and object of japanning, but Mr
Button passed the question by.

"He'd been bad enough for seein' fairies before they japanned him, but afther it,
begorra, he was twiced as bad. I was a slip of a lad at the time, but me hair near
turned grey wid the tales he'd tell of the Good People and their doin's. One night
they'd turn him into a harse an' ride him half over the county, wan chap on his back
an' another runnin' behind, shovin' furze prickles under his tail to make him buck-lep.
Another night it's a dunkey he'd be, harnessed to a little cart, an' bein' kicked in the
belly and made to draw stones. Thin it's a goose he'd be, runnin' over the common wid
his neck stritched out squawkin', an' an old fairy woman afther him wid a knife, till it
fair drove him to the dhrink; though, by the same token, he didn't want much dhrivin'.

"And what does he do when his money was gone, but tear the five-shillin' piece they'd
japanned him wid aff the top of his hed, and swaps it for a bottle of whisky, and that
was the end of him."

Mr Button paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and there was silence for a
moment.

The moon had risen, and the song of the surf on the reef filled the whole night with its
lullaby. The broad lagoon lay waving and rippling in the moonlight to the incoming
tide. Twice as broad it always looked seen by moonlight or starlight than when seen by
day. Occasionally the splash of a great fish would cross the silence, and the ripple of it
would pass a moment later across the placid water.

Big things happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the shore. You would
have found the wood behind them, had you walked through it, full of light. A tropic
forest under a tropic moon is green as a sea cave. You can see the vine tendrils and
the flowers, the orchids and tree boles all lit as by the light of an emerald-tinted day.

Mr Button took a long piece of string from his pocket.

"It's bedtime," said he; "and I'm going to tether Em'leen, for fear she'd be walkin' in
her slape, and wandherin' away an' bein' lost in the woods."

"I don't want to be tethered," said Emmeline.

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"It's for your own good I'm doin' it," replied Mr Button, fixing the string round her
waist. "Now come 'long."

He led her like a dog in a leash to the tent, and tied the other end of the string to the
scull, which was the tent's main prop and support.

"Now," said he, "if you be gettin' up and walkin' about in the night, it's down the tint
will be on top of us all."

And, sure enough, in the small hours of the morning, it was.

CHAPTER XV

FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE

"I don't want my old britches on! I don't want my old britches on!"

Dick was darting about naked on the sand, Mr Button after him with a pair of small
trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well have attempted to chase an antelope.

They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the keenest joy in
life to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows of the lagoon, to be naked
and sit drying in the sun. To be free from the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on
the beach in the form of breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind
and the sun and the sea.

The very first command Mr Button had given on the second morning of their arrival
was, "Strip and into the water wid you."

Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stood weeping in her
little chemise. But Mr Button was obdurate. The difficulty at first was to get them in;
the difficulty now was to keep them out.

Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sun after her dip,
and watching Dick's evolutions on the sand.

The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land. Woods where you
might knock ripe bananas off the trees with a big cane, sands where golden lizards
would scuttle about so tame that you might with a little caution seize them by the tail,
a hill-top from whence you might see, to use Paddy's expression, "to the back of
beyond"; all these were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to the lagoon.

Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddy fished, all
sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between the coral tufts. Hermit
crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the evicted ones' shells—an obvious
misfit; sea anemones as big as roses. Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if
you lowered the hook gently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked
about on feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks. The
overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back with a stone tied to a
bit of string, and down he would go flat, motionless and feigning death. There was a
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lot of human nature lurking in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy.

An English rock-pool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of this vast rock-pool,
nine miles round and varying from a third to half a mile broad, swarming with tropic
life and flights of painted fishes; where the glittering albicore passed beneath the boat
like a fire and a shadow; where the boat's reflection lay as clear on the bottom as
though the water were air; where the sea, pacified by the reef, told, like a little child,
its dreams.

It suited the lazy humour of Mr Button that he never pursued the lagoon more than
half a mile or so on either side of the beach. He would bring the fish he caught ashore,
and with the aid of his tinder box and dead sticks make a blazing fire on the sand;
cook fish and breadfruit and taro roots, helped and hindered by the children. They
fixed the tent amidst the trees at the edge of the chapparel, and made it larger and
more abiding with the aid of the dinghy's sail.

Amidst these occupations, wonders, and pleasures, the children lost all count of the
flight of time. They rarely asked about Mr Lestrange; after a while they did'nt ask
about him at all. Children soon forget.

PART III

CHAPTER XVI

THE POETRY OF LEARNING

To forget the passage of time you must live in the open air, in a warm climate, with as
few clothes as possible upon you. You must collect and cook your own food. Then,
after a while, if you have no special ties to bind you to civilisation, Nature will begin to
do for you what she does for the savage. You will recognise that it is possible to be
happy without books or newspapers, letters or bills. You will recognise the part sleep
plays in Nature.

After a month on the island you might have seen Dick at one moment full of life and
activity, helping Mr Button to dig up a taro root or what-not, the next curled up to
sleep like a dog. Emmeline the same. Profound and prolonged lapses into sleep;
sudden awakenings into a world of pure air and dazzling light, the gaiety of colour all
round. Nature had indeed opened her doors to these children.

One might have fancied her in an experimental mood, saying: "Let me put these buds
of civilisation back into my nursery and see what they will become—how they
will blossom, and what will be the end of it all."

Just as Emmeline had brought away her treasured box from the Northumberland, Dick
had conveyed with him a small linen bag that chinked when shaken. It contained
marbles. Small olive-green marbles and middle-sized ones of various colours; glass
marbles with splendid coloured cores; and one large old grandfather marble too big to
be played with, but none the less to be worshipped—a god marble.
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Of course one cannot play at marbles on board ship, but one can play WITH them.
They had been a great comfort to Dick on the voyage. He knew them each personally,
and he would roll them out on the mattress of his bunk and review them nearly every
day, whilst Emmeline looked on.

One day Mr Button, noticing Dick and the girl kneeling opposite each other on a flat,
hard piece of sand near the water's edge, strolled up to see what they were doing.
They were playing marbles. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his
mouth watching and criticising the game, pleased that the "childer" were amused.
Then he began to be amused himself, and in a few minutes more he was down on his
knees taking a hand; Emmeline, a poor player and an unenthusiastic one, withdrawing
in his favour.

After that it was a common thing to see them playing together, the old sailor on his
knees, one eye shut, and a marble against the nail of his horny thumb taking aim; Dick
and Emmeline on the watch to make sure he was playing fair, their shrill voices
echoing amidst the cocoa-nut trees with cries of "Knuckle down, Paddy, knuckle
down!" He entered into all their amusements just as one of themselves. On high and
rare occasions Emmeline would open her precious box, spread its contents and give a
tea-party, Mr Button acting as guest or president as the case might be.

"Is your tay to your likin', ma'am?" he would enquire; and Emmeline, sipping at her
tiny cup, would invariably make answer: "Another lump of sugar, if you please, Mr
Button"; to which would come the stereotyped reply: "Take a dozen, and welcome; and
another cup for the good of your make."

Then Emmeline would wash the things in imaginary water, replace them in the box,
and every one would lose their company manners and become quite natural again.

"Have you ever seen your name, Paddy?" asked Dick one morning.

"Seen me which?"

"Your name?"

"Arrah, don't be axin' me questions," replied the other. "How the divil could I see me
name?"

"Wait and I'll show you," replied Dick.

He ran and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the salt-white sand in face of
orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters:

BUTTEN

"Faith, an' it's a cliver boy y'are," said Mr Button admiringly, as he leaned luxuriously
against a cocoa-nut tree, and contemplated Dick's handiwork. "And that's me name, is
it? What's the letters in it?"

Dick enumerated them.

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"I'll teach you to do it, too," he said. "I'll teach you to write your name,
Paddy—would you like to write your name, Paddy?"

"No," replied the other, who only wanted to be let smoke his pipe in peace; "me
name's no use to me."

But Dick, with the terrible gadfly tirelessness of childhood, was not to be put off, and
the unfortunate Mr Button had to go to school despite himself. In a few days he could
achieve the act of drawing upon the sand characters somewhat like the above, but not
without prompting, Dick and Emmeline on each side of him, breathless for fear of a
mistake.

"Which next?" would ask the sweating scribe, the perspiration pouring from his
forehead—"which next? An' be quick, for it's moithered I am."

"N. N—that's right. Ow, you're making it crooked!—THAT'S

right—there! it's all there now—Hurroo!"

"Hurroo!" would answer the scholar, waving his old hat over his own name, and
"Hurroo!" would answer the cocoa-nut grove echoes; whilst the far, faint "Hi, hi!" of
the wheeling gulls on the reef would come over the blue lagoon as if in
acknowledgment of the deed, and encouragement.

The appetite comes with teaching. The pleasantest mental exercise of childhood is the
instruction of one's elders. Even Emmeline felt this. She took the geography class one
day in a timid manner, putting her little hand first in the great horny fist of her friend.

"Mr Button!"

"Well, honey?"

"I know g'ography."

"And what's that?" asked Mr Button.

This stumped Emmeline for a moment.

"It's where places are," she said at last.

"Which places?" enquired he.

"All sorts of places," replied Emmeline. "Mr Button!"

"What is it, darlin'?"

"Would you like to learn g'ography?"

"I'm not wishful for larnin'," said the other hurriedly. "It makes me head buzz to hear
them things they rade out of books."
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"Paddy," said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, "look here." He drew
the following on the sand:

[Illustration: A bad drawing of an elephant]

"That's an elephant," he said in a dubious voice.

Mr Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with enthusiastic assent. A
chill fell on the proceedings.

Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline felt disheartened.
Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile came into it for a
moment—a bright idea had struck her.

"Dicky," she said, "draw Henry the Eight."

Dick's face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew the following figure:

l l

/ \

"THAT'S not Henry the Eight," he explained, "but he will be in a minute. Daddy
showed me how to draw him; he's nothing till he gets his hat on."

"Put his hat on, put his hat on!" implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from the figure
on the sand to Mr Button's face, watching for the delighted smile with which she was
sure the old man would greet the great king when he appeared in all his glory.

Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry's hat on.

=== l
l l
/ \

Now no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the above, created
with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr Button remained unmoved.

"I did it for Mrs Sims," said Dick regretfully, "and she said it was the image of him."

"Maybe the hat's not big enough," said Emmeline, turning her head from side to side
as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt there must be something
wrong, as Mr Button did not applaud. Has not every true artist felt the same before
the silence of some critic?

Mr Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the class
rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry and his hat a figure on the
sand to be obliterated by the wind.

After a while, as time went on, Mr Button took to his lessons as a matter of course, the
small inventions of the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge.
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Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm
trees and the sky.

Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance of a
ship—a fact which gave Mr Button very little trouble; and even less to his
charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about ships.

The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words "rainy season" do not
conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in Manchester.

The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers followed by bursts of
sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and the delicious perfume of all manner
of growing things on the earth.

After the rains the old sailor said he'd be after making a house of bamboos before the
next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that they'd be off the island.

"However," said he, "I'll dra' you a picture of what it'll be like when it's up;" and on the
sand he drew a figure like this:

Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a cocoa-palm and
lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.

The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen desire to see one
built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is part of the multiform basis of the
American nature was aroused.

"How're you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together like that?" he
asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.

"Which from slippin'?"

"The canes—one from the other?"

"After you've fixed thim, one cross t'other, you drive a nail through the cross-piece and
a rope over all."

"Have you any nails, Paddy?"

"No," said Mr Button, "I haven't."

"Then how're you goin' to build the house?"

"Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe."

But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it was "Paddy, when
are you going to begin the house?" or, "Paddy, I guess I've got a way to make the
canes stick together without nailing." Till Mr Button, in despair, like a beaver, began
to build.
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There was great cane-cutting in the canebrake above, and, when sufficient had been
procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but
he had found a taskmaster.

The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old
bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that
he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to
build a house.

Mr Button didn't. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fishing or climbing a cocoa-nut
tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope round himself and the tree,
knotting it, and using it as a support during the climb; but house-building was
monotonous work.

He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could be held
together by notching them.

"And, faith, but it's a cliver boy you are," said the weary one admiringly, when the
other had explained his method.

"Then come along, Paddy, and stick 'em up."

Mr Button said he had no rope, that he'd have to think about it, that to-morrow or next
day he'd be after getting some notion how to do it without rope. But Dick pointed out
that the brown cloth which Nature has wrapped round the cocoa-palm stalks would do
instead of rope if cut in strips. Then the badgered one gave in.

They laboured for a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time had produced a
rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparel.

Out on the reef, to which they often rowed in the dinghy, when the tide was low, deep
pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said if they had a spear they might be
able to spear some of these fish, as he had seen the natives do away "beyant" in Tahiti.

Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a ten-foot cane
sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.

"Sure, what's the use of that?" said Mr Button. "You might job it into a fish, but he'd be
aff it in two ticks; it's the barb that holds them."

Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had whittled it down
about three feet from the end and on one side, and carved a fairly efficient barb. It
was good enough, at all events, to spear a "groper" with, that evening, in the sunset-lit
pools of the reef at low tide.

"There aren't any potatoes here," said Dick one day, after the second rains.

"We've et 'em all months ago," replied Paddy.

"How do potatoes grow?" enquired Dick.

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"Grow, is it? Why, they grow in the ground; and where else would they grow?" He
explained the process of potato-planting: cutting them into pieces so that there was an
eye in each piece, and so forth. "Having done this," said Mr Button, "you just chuck
the pieces in the ground; their eyes grow, green leaves `pop up,' and then, if you dug
the roots up maybe, six months after, you'd find bushels of potatoes in the ground,
ones as big as your head, and weeny ones. It's like a family of childer—some's
big and some's little. But there they are in the ground, and all you have to do is to take
a fark and dig a potful of them with a turn of your wrist, as many a time I've done it in
the ould days."

"Why didn't we do that?" asked Dick.

"Do what?" asked Mr Button.

"Plant some of the potatoes."

"And where'd we have found the spade to plant them with?"

"I guess we could have fixed up a spade," replied the boy. "I made a spade at home,
out of a piece of old board once—daddy helped."

"Well, skelp off with you, and make a spade now," replied the other, who wanted to be
quiet and think, "and you and Em'line can dig in the sand."

Emmeline was sitting nearby, stringing together some gorgeous blossoms on a tendril
of liana. Months of sun and ozone had made a considerable difference in the child. She
was as brown as a gipsy and freckled, not very much taller, but twice as plump. Her
eyes had lost considerably that look as though she were contemplating futurity and
immensity—not as abstractions, but as concrete images, and she had lost the
habit of sleep-walking.

The shock of the tent coming down on the first night she was tethered to the scull had
broken her of it, helped by the new healthful conditions of life, the sea-bathing, and
the eternal open air. There is no narcotic to excel fresh air.

Months of semi-savagery had made also a good deal of difference in Dick's

appearance. He was two inches taller than on the day they landed. Freckled and
tanned, he had the appearance of a boy of twelve. He was the promise of a fine man.
He was not a good-looking child, but he was healthy-looking, with a jolly laugh, and a
daring, almost impudent expression of face.

The question of the children's clothes was beginning to vex the mind of the old sailor.
The climate was a suit of clothes in itself. One was much happier with almost nothing
on. Of course there were changes of temperature, but they were slight. Eternal
summer, broken by torrential rains, and occasionally a storm, that was the climate of
the island; still, the "childer" couldn't go about with nothing on.

He took some of the striped flannel and made Emmeline a kilt. It was funny to see him
sitting on the sand, Emmeline standing before him with her garment round her waist,
being tried on; he, with a mouthful of pins, and the housewife with the scissors,
needles, and thread by his side.
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"Turn to the lift a bit more," he'd say, "aisy does it. Stidy so—musha! musha!
where's thim scissors? Dick, be holdin' the end of this bit of string till I get the stitches
in behint. Does that hang comfortable? well, an' you're the trouble an' all. How's
THAT? That's aisier, is it? Lift your fut till I see if it comes to your knees. Now off with
it, and lave me alone till I stitch the tags to it."

It was the mixture of a skirt and the idea of a sail, for it had two rows of reef points; a
most ingenious idea, as it could be reefed if the child wanted to go paddling, or in
windy weather.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DEVIL'S CASK

One morning, about a week after the day on which the old sailor, to use his own
expression, had bent a skirt on Emmeline, Dick came through the woods and across
the sands running. He had been on the hill-top.

"Paddy," he cried to the old man, who was fixing a hook on a fishing-line, "there's a
ship!"

It did not take Mr Button long to reach the hill-top, and there she was, beating up for
the island. Bluff-bowed and squab, the figure of an old Dutch woman, and telling of
her trade a league off. It was just after the rains, the sky was not yet quite clear of
clouds; you could see showers away at sea, and the sea was green and foam-capped.

There was the trying-out gear; there were the boats, the crow's nest, and all complete,
and labelling her a whaler. She was a ship, no doubt, but Paddy Button would as soon
have gone on board a ship manned by devils, and captained by Lucifer, as on board a
South Sea whaleman. He had been there before, and he knew.

He hid the children under a large banyan, and told them not to stir or breathe till he
came back, for the ship was "the devil's own ship"; and if the men on board caught
them they'd skin them alive and all.

Then he made for the beach; he collected all the things out of the wigwam, and all the
old truck in the shape of boots and old clothes, and stowed them away in the dinghy.
He would have destroyed the house, if he could, but he hadn't time. Then he rowed the
dinghy a hundred yards down the lagoon to the left, and moored her under the shade
of an aoa, whose branches grew right over the water. Then he came back through the
cocoa-nut grove on foot, and peered through the trees over the lagoon to see what was
to be seen.

The wind was blowing dead on for the opening in the reef, and the old whaleman came
along breasting the swell with her bluff bows, and entered the lagoon. There was no
leadsman in her chains. She just came in as if she knew all the soundings by
heart—as probably she did—for these whalemen know every hole and
corner in the Pacific.
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The anchor fell with a splash, and she swung to it, making a strange enough picture as
she floated on the blue mirror, backed by the graceful palm tree on the reef. Then Mr
Button, without waiting to see the boats lowered, made back to his charges, and the
three camped in the woods that night.

Next morning the whaleman was off and away, leaving as a token of her visit the white
sand all trampled, an empty bottle, half an old newspaper, and the wigwam torn to
pieces.

The old sailor cursed her and her crew, for the incident had brought a new exercise
into his lazy life. Every day now at noon he had to climb the hill, on the look-out for
whalemen. Whalemen haunted his dreams, though I doubt if he would willingly have
gone on board even a Royal Mail steamer. He was quite happy where he was. After
long years of the fo'cs'le the island was a change indeed. He had tobacco enough to
last him for an indefinite time, the children for companions, and food at his elbow. He
would have been entirely happy if the island had only been supplied by Nature with a
public-house.

The spirit of hilarity and good fellowship, however, who suddenly discovered this error
on the part of Nature, rectified it, as will be presently seen.

The most disastrous result of the whaleman's visit was not the destruction of the
"house," but the disappearance of Emmeline's box. Hunt high or hunt low, it could not
be found. Mr Button in his hurry must have forgotten it when he removed the things to
the dinghy—at all events, it was gone. Probably one of the crew of the
whalemen had found it and carried it off with him; no one could say. It was gone, and
there was the end of the matter, and the beginning of great tribulation, that lasted
Emmeline for a week.

She was intensely fond of coloured things, coloured flowers especially; and she had
the prettiest way of making them into a wreath for her own or someone else's head. It
was the hat-making instinct that was at work in her, perhaps; at all events, it was a
feminine instinct, for Dick made no wreaths.

One morning, as she was sitting by the old sailor engaged in stringing shells, Dick
came running along the edge of the grove. He had just come out of the wood, and he
seemed to be looking for something. Then he found what he was in search of—a
big shell—and with it in his hand made back to the wood.

Item.—His dress was a piece of cocoa-nut cloth tied round his middle. Why he
wore it at all, goodness knows, for he would as often as not be running about stark
naked.

"I've found something, Paddy!" he cried, as he disappeared among the trees.

"What have you found?" piped Emmeline, who was always interested in new things.

"Something funny!" came back from amidst the trees.

Presently he returned; but he was not running now. He was walking slowly and
carefully, holding the shell as if it contained something precious that he was afraid
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would escape.

"Paddy, I turned over the old barrel and it had a cork thing in it, and I pulled it out,
and the barrel is full of awfully funny-smelling stuff—I've brought some for you
to see."

He gave the shell into the old sailor's hands. There was about half a gill of yellow
liquid in the shell. Paddy smelt it, tasted, and gave a shout.

"Rum, begorra!"

"What is it, Paddy?" asked Emmeline.

"WHERE did you say you got it—in the ould bar'l, did you say?" asked Mr
Button, who seemed dazed and stunned as if by a blow.

"Yes; I pulled the cork thing out—"

"DID YIZ PUT IT BACK?"

"Yes."

"Oh, glory be to God! Here have I been, time out of mind, sittin' on an ould empty
bar'l, with me tongue hangin' down to me heels for the want of a drink, and it full of
rum all the while!"

He took a sip of the stuff, tossed the lot off, closed his lips tight to keep in the fumes,
and shut one eye.

Emmeline laughed.

Mr Button scrambled to his feet. They followed him through the chapparel till they
reached the water source. There lay the little green barrel; turned over by the restless
Dick, it lay with its bung pointing to the leaves above. You could see the hollow it had
made in the soft soil during the years. So green was it, and so like an object of nature,
a bit of old tree-bole, or a lichen-stained boulder, that though the whalemen had
actually watered from the source, its real nature had not been discovered.

Mr Button tapped on it with the butt-end of the shell: it was nearly full. Why it had
been left there, by whom, or how, there was no one to tell. The old lichen-covered
skulls might have told, could they have spoken.

"We'll rowl it down to the beach," said Paddy, when he had taken another taste of it.

He gave Dick a sip. The boy spat it out, and made a face, then, pushing the barrel
before them, they began to roll it downhill to the beach, Emmeline running before
them crowned with flowers.
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CHAPTER XVIII

THE RAT HUNT

They had dinner at noon. Paddy knew how to cook fish, island fashion, wrapping them
in leaves, and baking them in a hole in the ground in which a fire had previously been
lit. They had fish and taro root baked, and green cocoa-nuts; and after dinner Mr
Button filled a big shell with rum, and lit his pipe.

The rum had been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as he was to the
appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the "Barbary coast" at San
Francisco, or the public-houses of the docks, this stuff was nectar.

Joviality radiated from him: it was infectious. The children felt that some happy
influence had fallen upon their friend. Usually after dinner he was drowsy and "wishful
to be quiet." To-day he told them stories of the sea, and sang them
songs—chantys:
down."
man
the
blow
to
time
us
give
down.Oh,
man
the
blow
bullies,
down,
man
the
down,Blow
man
the
blow
ho!
York,Yeo
New
from
back
come
black-baller
dirty
a
down.You're
man
the
blow
to
TIME
us
give
down,Oh,
man
the
blow
bullies,
down,
man
the
down.Blow
man
the
blow
ho!
Kong,Yeo
Hong
from
back
come
sailor
fish
flyin'
a
"I'm
"Oh, give us TIME to blow the man down!" echoed Dick and Emmeline.

Up above, in the trees, the bright-eyed birds were watching them—such a

happy party. They had all the appearance of picnickers, and the song echoed amongst
the cocoa-nut trees, and the wind carried it over the lagoon to where the sea-gulls
were wheeling and screaming, and the foam was thundering on the reef.

That evening, Mr Button feeling inclined for joviality, and not wishing the children to
see him under the influence, rolled the barrel through the cocoa-nut grove to a little
clearing by the edge of the water. There, when the children were in bed and asleep, he
repaired with some green cocoa-nuts and a shell. He was generally musical when
amusing himself in this fashion, and Emmeline, waking up during the night, heard his
voice borne through the moonlit cocoa-nut grove by the wind:
free."
set
all
are
slaves
the
and
fallen,
has
Babylon
jubilee,For
the
stidy—sound
boys,
grave.Stidy,
the
or
glory
to
us
lade
it
may
wave!Long
it
may
long
flag,
the
up
jar."Chorus.—Hoist
five-gallon
big
a
themFrom
servin'
was
he
Larry,
bar,And
the
before
sailorsStandin'
drunken
old
six
or
five
were
"There
Next morning the musician awoke beside the cask. He had not a trace of a headache,
or any bad feeling, but he made Dick do the cooking; and he lay in the shade of the
cocoa-nut trees, with his head on a "pilla" made out of an old coat rolled up, twiddling
his thumbs, smoking his pipe, and discoursing about the "ould" days, half to himself
and half to his companions.

That night he had another musical evening all to himself, and so it went on for a week.
Then he began to lose his appetite and sleep; and one morning Dick found him sitting
on the sand looking very queer indeed—as well he might, for he had been
"seeing things" since dawn.

"What is it, Paddy?" said the boy, running up, followed by Emmeline.

Mr Button was staring at a point on the sand close by. He had his right hand raised
after the manner of a person who is trying to catch a fly. Suddenly he made a grab at
the sand, and then opened his hand wide to see what he had caught.

"What is it, Paddy?"

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"The Cluricaune," replied Mr Button. "All dressed in green he was—musha!
musha! but it's only pretindin' I am."

The complaint from which he was suffering has this strange thing about it, that,
though the patient sees rats, or snakes, or what-not, as real-looking as the real things,
and though they possess his mind for a moment, almost immediately he recognises
that he is suffering from a delusion.

The children laughed, and Mr Button laughed in a stupid sort of way.

"Sure, it was only a game I was playin'—there was no Cluricaune at

all—it's whin I dhrink rum it puts it into me head to play games like that. Oh, be
the Holy Poker, there's red rats comin' out of the sand!"

He got on his hands and knees and scuttle off towards the cocoanut trees, looking
over his shoulder with a bewildered expression on his face. He would have risen to fly,
only he dared not stand up.

The children laughed and danced round him as he crawled.

"Look at the rats, Paddy! look at the rats!" cried Dick.

"They're in front of me!" cried the afflicted one, making a vicious grab at an imaginary
rodent's tail. "Ran dan the bastes! now they're gone. Musha, but it's a fool I'm makin'
of meself."

"Go on, Paddy," said Dick; "don't stop. Look there—there's more rats coming
after you!"

"Oh, whisht, will you?" replied Paddy, taking his seat on the sand, and wiping his
brow. "They're aff me now."

The children stood by, disappointed of their game. Good acting appeals to children
just as much as to grown-up people. They stood waiting for another excess of humour
to take the comedian, and they had not to wait long.

A thing like a flayed horse came out of the lagoon and up the beach, and this time
Button did not crawl away. He got on his feet and ran.

"It's a harse that's afther me—it's a harse that's afther me! Dick! Dick! hit him a
skelp. Dick! Dick! dhrive him away."

"Hurroo! Hurroo!" cried Dick, chasing the afflicted one, who was running in a wide
circle, his broad red face slewed over his left shoulder. "Go it, Paddy! go it, Paddy!"

"Kape off me, you baste!" shouted Paddy. "Holy Mary, Mother of God! I'll land you a
kick wid me fut if yiz come nigh me. Em'leen! Em'leen! come betune us!"

He tripped, and over he went on the sand, the indefatigable Dick beating him with a
little switch he had picked up to make him continue.
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"I'm better now, but I'm near wore out," said Mr Button, sitting up on the sand. "But,
bedad, if I'm chased by any more things like them it's into the say I'll be dashin'. Dick,
lend me your arum."

He took Dick's arm and wandered over to the shade of the trees. Here he threw
himself down, and told the children to leave him to sleep. They recognised that the
game was over and left him. And he slept for six hours on end; it was the first real
sleep he had had for several days. When he awoke he was well, but very shaky.

CHAPTER XIX

STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM

Mr Button saw no more rats, much to Dick's disappointment. He was off the drink. At
dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and wandered down to the edge
of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced the east, and the light of the dawn came
rippling in with the flooding tide.

"It's a baste I've been," said the repentant one, "a brute baste."

He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset and betrayed.

He stood for a while, cursing the drink, "and them that sells it." Then he determined to
put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull the bung out of the barrel, and let the
contents escape?

Such a thought never even occurred to him—or, if it did, was instantly

dismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the drink, good rum is to him a
sacred thing; and to empty half a little barrel of it into the sea, would be an act almost
equivalent to child-murder. He put the cask into the dinghy, and rowed it over to the
reef. There he placed it in the shelter of a great lump of coral, and rowed back.

Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four months or so had
generally elapsed between his bouts—sometimes six; it all depended on the
length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before he felt even an inclination to look
at the rum cask, that tiny dark spot away on the reef. And it was just as well, for
during those six months another whale-ship arrived, watered and was avoided.

"Blisther it!" said he; "the say here seems to breed whale-ships, and nothin' but
whaleships. It's like bugs in a bed: you kill wan, and then another comes.
Howsumever, we're shut of thim for a while."

He walked down to the lagoon edge, looked at the little dark spot and whistled. Then
he walked back to prepare dinner. That little dark spot began to trouble him after a
while; not it, but the spirit it contained.

Days grew long and weary, the days that had been so short and pleasant. To the
children there was no such thing as time. Having absolute and perfect health, they
enjoyed happiness as far as mortals can enjoy it. Emmeline's highly strung nervous
system, it is true, developed a headache when she had been too long in the glare of
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the sun, but they were few and far between.

The spirit in the little cask had been whispering across the lagoon for some weeks; at
last it began to shout. Mr Button, metaphorically speaking, stopped his ears. He
busied himself with the children as much as possible. He made another garment for
Emmeline, and cut Dick's hair with the scissors (a job which was generally performed
once in a couple of months).

One night, to keep the rum from troubling his head, he told them the story of Jack
Dogherty and the Merrow, which is well known on the western coast.

The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea, and shows him the lobster
pots wherein he keeps the souls of old sailormen, and then they have dinner, and the
Merrow produces a big bottle of rum.

It was a fatal story for him to remember and recount; for, after his companions were
asleep, the vision of the Merrow and Jack hobnobbing, and the idea of the jollity of it,
rose before him, and excited a thirst for joviality not to be resisted.

There were some green cocoa-nuts that he had plucked that day lying in a little heap
under a tree—half a dozen or so. He took several of these and a shell, found the
dinghy where it was moored to the aoa tree, unmoored her, and pushed off into the
lagoon.

The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the water might have been
seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and the thunder of the surf on the reef
filled the night with its song.

He fixed the boat's painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and
with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch
on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the coral strand could be
obtained.

On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the great breakers coming in,
all marbled and clouded and rainbowed with spindrift and sheets of spray. But the
snow and the song of them under the diffused light of the stars produced a more
indescribably beautiful and strange effect.

The tide was going out now, and Mr Button, as he sat smoking his pipe and drinking
his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where the water lay in rock-pools.
When he had contemplated these sights for a considerable time in complete
contentment, he returned to the lagoon side of the reef and sat down beside the little
barrel. Then, after a while, if you had been standing on the strand opposite, you would
have heard scraps of song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.
Barbaree."
of
coast
the
down,On
sailing
down,
"Sailing
Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, or the true and
proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; and when you hear it, whether on
a reef of coral or a granite quay, you may feel assured that an old-time sailor-man is
singing it, and that the old-time sailor-man is bemused.
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Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the starlit waters and great
shaking circles of light made rhythmical answer to the slow and steady creak of the
thole pins against the leather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safely
shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear of waking the "childer."
As the children were sleeping more than two hundred yards away, this was a needless
precaution especially as the intervening distance was mostly soft sand.

Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough to drink, but they
are better drunk separately; combined, not even the brain of an old sailor can make
anything of them but mist and muddlement; that is to say, in the way of
thought—in the way of action they can make him do a lot. They made Paddy
Button swim the lagoon.

The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the strand towards the
wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of
fact, safe and sound tied to the aoa; but Mr Button's memory told him it was tied to
the reef. How he had crossed the lagoon was of no importance at all to him; the fact
that he had crossed without the boat, yet without getting wet, did not appear to him
strange. He had no time to deal with trifles like these. The dinghy had to be fetched
across the lagoon, and there was only one way of fetching it. So he came back down
the beach to the water's edge, cast down his boots, cast off his coat, and plunged in.
The lagoon was wide, but in his present state of mind he would have swum the
Hellespont. His figure gone from the beach, the night resumed its majesty and aspect
of meditation.

So lit was the lagoon by starshine that the head of the swimmer could be distinguished
away out in the midst of circles of light; also, as the head neared the reef, a dark
triangle that came shearing through water past the palm tree at the pier. It was the
night patrol of the lagoon, who had heard in some mysterious manner that a drunken
sailor-man was making trouble in his waters.

Looking, one listened, hand on heart, for the scream of the arrested one, yet it did not
come. The swimmer, scrambling on to the reef in an exhausted manner, forgetful
evidently of the object for which he had returned, made for the rum cask, and fell
down beside it as though sleep had touched him instead of death.

CHAPTER XX

THE DREAMER ON THE REEF

"I wonder where Paddy is?" cried Dick next morning. He was coming out of the
chapparel, pulling a dead branch after him. "He's left his coat on the sand, and the
tinder box in it, so I'll make the fire. There's no use waiting. I want my breakfast.
Bother!"

He trod the dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces.

Emmeline sat on the sand and watched him.

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Emmeline had two gods of a sort: Paddy Button and Dick. Paddy was almost an
esoteric god wrapped in the fumes of tobacco and mystery. The god of rolling ships
and creaking masts—the masts and vast sail spaces of the Northumberland
were an enduring vision in her mind—the deity who had lifted her from a little
boat into this marvellous place, where the birds were coloured and the fish were
painted, where life was never dull, and the skies scarcely ever grey.

Dick, the other deity, was a much more understandable personage, but no less
admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five months of island
life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as a boy of twelve, and could
scull the boat almost as well as Paddy himself, and light a fire. Indeed, during the last
few months Mr Button, engaged in resting his bones, and contemplating rum as an
abstract idea, had left the cooking and fishing and general gathering of food as much
as possible to Dick.

"It amuses the craythur to pritind he's doing things," he would say, as he watched Dick
delving in the earth to make a little oven—Island-fashion—for the
cooking of fish or what-not.

"Come along, Em," said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some rotten hibiscus
sticks; "give me the tinder box."

He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not unlike Aeolus as
represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of schiedam and snuff, and give one
mermaids and angels instead of soundings.

The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in profusion, for
there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook breadfruit.

The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour according to season.
These that Dick was preparing to cook were as large as small melons. Two would be
more than enough for three people's breakfast. They were green and knobbly on the
outside, and they suggested to the mind unripe lemons, rather than bread.

He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and presently they
sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then they cracked, and the white inner
substance became visible. He cut them open and took the core out—the core is
not fit to eat—and they were ready.

Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.

There were in the lagoon—there are in several other tropical lagoons I know
of—a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze herring it
looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the background of coral
brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of burnished gold. It is as good to eat
as to look at, and Emmeline was carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.

The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were accidents at
times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst shouts of derision from Dick.
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She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the "skirt" round the waist looking not
unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent, and filled with the seriousness of the
job on hand, and her lips puckered out at the heat of the fire.

"It's so hot!" she cried in self-defence, after the first of the accidents.

"Of course it's hot," said Dick, "if you stick to looward of the fire. How often has Paddy
told you to keep to windward of it!"

"I don't know which is which," confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who was an
absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row nor fish, nor throw a
stone, and who, though they had now been on the island twenty-eight months or so,
could not even swim.

"You mean to say," said Dick, "that you don't know where the wind comes from?"

"Yes, I know that."

"Well, that's to windward."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, you know it now."

"Yes, I know it now."

"Well, then, come to windward of the fire. Why didn't you ask the meaning of it
before?"

"I did," said Emmeline; "I asked Mr Button one day, and he told me a lot about it. He
said if he was to spit to windward and a person was to stand to loo'ard of him, he'd be
a fool; and he said if a ship went too much to loo'ard she went on the rocks, but I
didn't understand what he meant. Dicky, I wonder where he is?"

"Paddy!" cried Dick, pausing in the act of splitting open a breadfruit. Echoes came
from amidst the cocoa-nut trees, but nothing more.

"Come on," said Dick; "I'm not going to wait for him. He may have gone to fetch up the
night lines"—they sometimes put down night lines in the lagoon—"and
fallen asleep over them."

Now, though Emmeline honoured Mr Button as a minor deity, Dick had no illusions at
all upon the matter. He admired Paddy because he could knot, and splice, and climb a
cocoanut tree, and exercise his sailor craft in other admirable ways, but he felt the old
man's limitations. They ought to have had potatoes now, but they had eaten both
potatoes and the possibility of potatoes when they consumed the contents of that half
sack. Young as he was, Dick felt the absolute thriftlessness of this proceeding.
Emmeline did not; she never thought of potatoes, though she could have told you the
colour of all the birds on the island.
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Then, again, the house wanted rebuilding, and Mr Button said every day he would set
about seeing after it to-morrow, and on the morrow it would be to-morrow. The
necessities of the life they led were a stimulus to the daring and active mind of the
boy; but he was always being checked by the go-as-you-please methods of his elder.
Dick came of the people who make sewing machines and typewriters. Mr Button came
of a people notable for ballads, tender hearts, and potheen. That was the main
difference.

"Paddy!" again cried the boy, when he had eaten as much as he wanted. "Hullo! where
are you?"

They listened, but no answer came. A bright-hued bird flew across the sand space, a
lizard scuttled across the glistening sand, the reef spoke, and the wind in the
tree-tops; but Mr Button made no reply.

"Wait," said Dick.

He ran through the grove towards the aoa where the dinghy was moored; then he
returned.

"The dinghy is all right," he said. "Where on earth can he be?"

"I don't know," said Emmeline, upon whose heart a feeling of loneliness had fallen.

"Let's go up the hill," said Dick; "perhaps we'll find him there."

They went uphill through the wood, past the water-course. Every now and then Dick
would call out, and echoes would answer—there were quaint, moist-voiced
echoes amidst the trees or a bevy of birds would take flight. The little waterfall
gurgled and whispered, and the great banana leaves spread their shade.

"Come on," said Dick, when he had called again without receiving a reply.

They found the hill-top, and the great boulder stood casting its shadow in the sun. The
morning breeze was blowing, the sea sparkling, the reef flashing, the foliage of the
island waving in the wind like the flames of a green-flamed torch. A deep swell was
spreading itself across the bosom of the Pacific. Some hurricane away beyond the
Navigators or Gilberts had sent this message and was finding its echo here, a
thousand miles away, in the deeper thunder of the reef.

Nowhere else in the world could you get such a picture, such a combination of
splendour and summer, such a vision of freshness and strength, and the delight of
morning. It was the smallness of the island, perhaps, that closed the charm and made
it perfect. Just a bunch of foliage and flowers set in the midst of the blowing wind and
sparkling blue.

Suddenly Dick, standing beside Emmeline on the rock, pointed with his finger to the
reef near the opening.

"There he is!" cried he.

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CHAPTER XXI

THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS

You could just make the figure out lying on the reef near the little cask, and
comfortably sheltered from the sun by an upstanding lump of coral.

"He's asleep," said Dick.

He had not thought to look towards the reef from the beach, or he might have seen the
figure before.

"Dicky!" said Emmeline.

"Well?"

"How did he get over, if you said the dinghy was tied to the tree?"

"I don't know," said Dick, who had not thought of this; "there he is, anyhow. I'll tell you
what, Em, we'll row across and wake him. I'll boo into his ear and make him jump."

They got down from the rock, and came back down through the wood. As they came
Emmeline picked flowers and began making them up into one of her wreaths. Some
scarlet hibiscus, some bluebells, a couple of pale poppies with furry stalks and bitter
perfume.

"What are you making that for?" asked Dick, who always viewed Emmeline's
wreath-making with a mixture of compassion and vague disgust.

"I'm going to put it on Mr Button's head," said Emmeline; "so's when you say boo into
his ear he'll jump up with it on."

Dick chuckled with pleasure at the idea of the practical joke, and almost admitted in
his own mind for a moment, that after all there might be a use for such futilities as
wreaths.

The dinghy was moored under the spreading shade of the aoa, the painter tied to one
of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarf aoas branch in an
extraordinary way close to the ground, throwing out limbs like rails. The tree had
made a good protection for the little boat, protecting it from marauding hands and
from the sun; besides the protection of the tree Paddy had now and then scuttled the
boat in shallow water. It was a new boat to start with, and with precautions like these
might be expected to last many years.

"Get in," said Dick, pulling on the painter so that the bow of the dinghy came close to
the beach.

Emmeline got carefully in, and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off, and took to the
sculls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling water.
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Dick rowed cautiously, fearing to wake the sleeper. He fastened the painter to the
coral spike that seemed set there by nature for the purpose. He scrambled on to the
reef, and lying down on his stomach drew the boat's gunwale close up so that
Emmeline might land. He had no boots on; the soles of his feet, from constant
exposure, had become insensitive as leather.

Emmeline also was without boots. The soles of her feet, as is always the case with
highly nervous people, were sensitive, and she walked delicately, avoiding the worst
places, holding her wreath in her right hand.

It was full tide, and the thunder of the waves outside shook the reef. It was like being
in a church when the deep bass of the organ is turned full on, shaking the ground and
the air, the walls and the roof. Dashes of spray came over with the wind, and the
melancholy "Hi, hi!" of the wheeling gulls came like the voices of ghostly sailor-men
hauling at the halyards.

Paddy was lying on his right side steeped in profound oblivion. His face was buried in
the crook of his right arm, and his brown tattooed left hand lay on his left thigh, palm
upwards. He had no hat, and the breeze stirred his grizzled hair.

Dick and Emmeline stole up to him till they got right beside him. Then Emmeline,
flashing out a laugh, flung the little wreath of flowers on the old man's head, and Dick,
popping down on his knees, shouted into his ear. But the dreamer did not stir or move
a finger.

"Paddy," cried Dick, "wake up! wake up!"

He pulled at the shoulder till the figure from its sideways posture fell over on its back.
The eyes were wide open and staring. The mouth hung open, and from the mouth
darted a little crab; it scuttled over the chin and dropped on the coral.

Emmeline screamed, and screamed, and would have fallen, but the boy caught her in
his arms—one side of the face had been destroyed by the larvae of the rocks.

He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon its back, hands
outspread. Then, wild with terror, he dragged her towards the little boat. She was
struggling, and panting and gasping, like a person drowning in ice-cold water.

His one instinct was to escape, to fly anywhere, no matter where. He dragged the girl
to the coral edge, and pulled the boat up close. Had the reef suddenly become
enveloped in flames he could not have exerted himself more to escape from it and save
his companion. A moment later they were afloat, and he was pulling wildly for the
shore.

He did not know what had happened, nor did he pause to think: he was fleeing from
horror—nameless horror; whilst the child at his feet, with her head resting
against the gunwale, stared up open-eyed and speechless at the great blue sky, as if at
some terror visible there. The boat grounded on the white sand, and the wash of the
incoming tide drove it up sideways.

Emmeline had fallen forward; she had lost consciousness.

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CHAPTER XXII

ALONE
The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, for all that terrible night,
when the children lay huddled together in the little hut in the chapparel, the fear that
filled them was that their old friend might suddenly darken the entrance and seek to
lie down beside them.

They did not speak about him. Something had been done to him; something had
happened. Something terrible had happened to the world they knew. But they dared
not speak of it or question each other.

Dick had carried his companion to the hut when he left the boat, and hidden with her
there; the evening had come on, and the night, and now in the darkness, without
having tasted food all day, he was telling her not to be afraid, that he would take care
of her. But not a word of the thing that had happened.

The thing, for them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come across
death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the sayings of sages and
poets.

They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is the common lot, and
the natural sequence to birth, or the religion that teaches us that Death is the door to
Life.

A dead old sailor-man lying like a festering carcass on a coral ledge, eyes staring and
glazed and fixed, a wide-open mouth that once had spoken comforting words, and now
spoke living crabs.

That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it; and though they
were filled with terror, I do not think it was terror that held them from speaking about
it, but a vague feeling that what they had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a
thing to avoid.

Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them there was a good
God who looked after the world; determined as far as he could to exclude demonology
and sin and death from their knowledge, he had rested content with the bald
statement that there was a good God who looked after the world, without explaining
fully that the same God would torture them for ever and ever, should they fail to
believe in Him or keep His commandments.

This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge, the vaguest
abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the most strictly Calvinistic
school, this knowledge of Him would have been no comfort now. Belief in God is no
comfort to a frightened child. Teach him as many parrot-like prayers as you please,
and in distress or the dark of what use are they to him? His cry is for his nurse, or his
mother.
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During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek anywhere in the
whole wide universe but in each other. She, in a sense of his protection, he, in a sense
of being her protector. The manliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical
strength, developed in those dark hours just as a plant under extraordinary
circumstances is hurried into bloom.

Towards dawn Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when he had assured
himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep, and, pushing the tendrils and
the branches of the mammee apples aside, found the beach. The dawn was just
breaking, and the morning breeze was coming in from the sea.

When he had beached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at the flood, and it
had left her stranded. The tide was coming in now, and in a short time it would be far
enough up to push her off.

Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away. Take her away somewhere
from there, and he had promised, without knowing in the least how he was to perform
his promise. As he stood looking at the beach, so desolate and strangely different now
from what it was the day before, an idea of how he could fulfil his promise came to
him. He ran down to where the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with the ripples of
the incoming tide just washing the rudder, which was still shipped. He unshipped the
rudder and came back.

Under a tree, covered with the stay-sail they had brought from the Shenandoah, lay
most of their treasures: old clothes and boots, and all the other odds and ends. The
precious tobacco stitched up in a piece of canvas was there, and the housewife with
the needles and threads. A hole had been dug in the sand as a sort of cache for them,
and the stay-sail put over them to protect them from the dew.

The sun was now looking over the sealine, and the tall cocoa-nut trees were singing
and whispering together under the strengthening breeze.

CHAPTER XXIII

THEY MOVE AWAY

He began to collect the things, and carry them to the dinghy. He took the stay-sail and
everything that might be useful; and when he had stowed them in the boat, he took
the breaker and filled it with water at the water source in the wood; he collected some
bananas and breadfruit, and stowed them in the dinghy with the breaker. Then he
found the remains of yesterday's breakfast, which he had hidden between two
palmetto leaves, and placed it also in the boat.

The water was now so high that a strong push would float her. He turned back to the
hut for Emmeline. She was still asleep: so soundly asleep, that when he lifted her up in
his arms she made no movement. He placed her carefully in the stern-sheets with her
head on the sail rolled up, and then standing in the bow pushed off with a scull. Then,
taking the sculls, he turned the boat's head up the lagoon to the left. He kept close to
the shore, but for the life of him he could not help lifting his eyes and looking towards
the reef.
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Round a certain spot on the distant white coral there was a great commotion of birds.
Huge birds some of them seemed, and the "Hi! hi! hi!" of them came across the lagoon
on the breeze as they quarrelled together and beat the air with their wings. He turned
his head away till a bend of the shore hid the spot from sight.

Here, sheltered more completely than opposite the break in the reef, the artu came in
places right down to the water's edge; the breadfruit trees cast the shadow of their
great scalloped leaves upon the water; glades, thick with fern, wildernesses of the
mammee apple, and bushes of the scarlet "wild cocoanut" all slipped by, as the dinghy,
hugging the shore, crept up the lagoon.

Gazing at the shore edge one might have imagined it the edge of a lake, but for the
thunder of the Pacific upon the distant reef; and even that did not destroy the
impression, but only lent a strangeness to it.

A lake in the midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was.

Here and there cocoa-nut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their delicate stems,
and tracing their clear-cut shadows on the sandy bottom a fathom deep below.

He kept close in-shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His object was to find
some place where they might stop permanently, and put up a tent. He was seeking a
new home, in fact. But, pretty as were the glades they passed, they were not attractive
places to live in. There were too many trees, or the ferns were too deep. He was
seeking air and space, and suddenly he found it. Rounding a little cape, all blazing
with the scarlet of the wild cocoa-nut, the dinghy broke into a new world.

Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue wind-swept water, down to which came
a broad green sward of park-like land set on either side with deep groves, and leading
up and away to higher land, where, above the massive and motionless green of the
great breadfruit trees, the palm trees swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers
in the breeze. The pale colour of the water was due to the extreme shallowness of the
lagoon just here. So shallow was it that one could see brown spaces indicating beds of
dead and rotten coral, and splashes of darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay. The
reef lay more than half a mile from the shore: a great way out, it seemed, so far out
that its cramping influence was removed, and one had the impression of wide and
unbroken sea.

Dick rested on his oars, and let the dinghy float whilst he looked around him. He had
come some four miles and a half, and this was right at the back of the island. As the
boat drifting shoreward touched the bank, Emmeline awakened from her sleep, sat up,
and looked around her.

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PART I

CHAPTER I

UNDER THE ARTU TREE

On the edge of the green sward, between a diamond-chequered artu trunk and the
massive bole of a breadfruit, a house had come into being. It was not much larger than
a big hen-house, but quite sufficient for the needs of two people in a climate of eternal
summer. It was built of bamboos, and thatched with a double thatch of palmetto
leaves, so neatly built, and so well thatched, that one might have fancied it the
production of several skilled workmen.

The breadfruit tree was barren of fruit, as these trees sometimes are, whole groves of
them ceasing to bear for some mysterious reason only known to Nature. It was green
now, but when suffering its yearly change the great scalloped leaves would take all
imaginable tinges of gold and bronze and amber. Beyond the artu was a little clearing,
where the chapparel had been carefully removed and taro roots planted.

Stepping from the house doorway on to the sward you might have fancied yourself,
except for the tropical nature of the foliage, in some English park.

Looking to the right, the eye became lost in the woods, where all tints of green were
tinging the foliage, and the bushes of the wild cocoa-nut burned scarlet as hawberries.

The house had a doorway, but no door. It might have been said to have a double roof,
for the breadfruit foliage above gave good shelter during the rains. Inside it was bare
enough. Dried, sweet-smelling ferns covered the floor. Two sails, rolled up, lay on
either side of the doorway. There was a rude shelf attached to one of the walls, and on
the shelf some bowls made of cocoa-nut shell. The people to whom the place belonged
evidently did not trouble it much with their presence, using it only at night, and as a
refuge from the dew.

Sitting on the grass by the doorway, sheltered by the breadfruit shade, yet with the
hot rays of the afternoon sun just touching her naked feet, was a girl. A girl of fifteen
or sixteen, naked, except for a kilt of gaily-striped material reaching from her waist to
her knees. Her long black hair was drawn back from the forehead, and tied behind
with a loop of the elastic vine. A scarlet blossom was stuck behind her right ear, after
the fashion of a clerk's pen. Her face was beautiful, powdered with tiny freckles;
especially under the eyes, which were of a deep, tranquil blue-grey. She half sat, half
lay on her left side; whilst before her, quite close, strutted up and down on the grass, a
bird, with blue plumage, coral-red beak, and bright, watchful eyes.

The girl was Emmeline Lestrange. Just by her elbow stood a little bowl made from half
a cocoa-nut, and filled with some white substance with which she was feeding the
bird. Dick had found it in the woods two years ago, quite small, deserted by its
mother, and starving. They had fed it and tamed it, and it was now one of the family,
roosting on the roof at night, and appearing regularly at meal times.
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All at once she held out her hand; the bird flew into the air, lit on her forefinger and
balanced itself, sinking its head between its shoulders, and uttering the sound which
formed its entire vocabulary and one means of vocal expression—a sound from
which it had derived its name.

"Koko," said Emmeline, "where is Dick?"

The bird turned his head about, as if he were searching for his master; and the girl lay
back lazily on the grass, laughing, and holding him up poised on her finger, as if he
were some enamelled jewel she wished to admire at a little distance. They made a
pretty picture under the cave-like shadow of the breadfruit leaves; and it was difficult
to understand how this young girl, so perfectly formed, so fully developed, and so
beautiful, had evolved from plain little Emmeline Lestrange. And the whole thing, as
far as the beauty of her was concerned, had happened during the last six months.

CHAPTER II

HALF CHILD—HALF SAVAGE

Five rainy seasons had passed and gone since the tragic occurrence on the reef. Five
long years the breakers had thundered, and the sea-gulls had cried round the figure
whose spell had drawn a mysterious barrier across the lagoon.

The children had never returned to the old place. They had kept entirely to the back of
the island and the woods—the lagoon, down to a certain point, and the reef; a
wide enough and beautiful enough world, but a hopeless world, as far as help from
civilisation was concerned. For, of the few ships that touched at the island in the
course of years, how many would explore the lagoon or woods? Perhaps not one.

Occasionally Dick would make an excursion in the dinghy to the old place, but
Emmeline refused to accompany him. He went chiefly to obtain bananas; for on the
whole island there was but one clump of banana trees—that near the water
source in the wood, where the old green skulls had been discovered, and the little
barrel.

She had never quite recovered from the occurrence on the reef. Something had been
shown to her, the purport of which she vaguely understood, and it had filled her with
horror and a terror of the place where it had occurred. Dick was quite different. He
had been frightened enough at first; but the feeling wore away in time.

Dick had built three houses in succession during the five years. He had laid out a
patch of taro and another of sweet potatoes. He knew every pool on the reef for two
miles either way, and the forms of their inhabitants; and though he did not know the
names of the creatures to be found there, he made a profound study of their habits.

He had seen some astonishing things during these five years—from a fight
between a whale and two thrashers conducted outside the reef, lasting an hour, and
dyeing the breaking waves with blood, to the poisoning of the fish in the lagoon by
fresh water, due to an extraordinarily heavy rainy season.
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He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and the forms of life that
inhabited them, butterflies and moths and birds, lizards, and insects of strange shape;
extraordinary orchids—some filthy-looking, the very image of corruption, some
beautiful, and all strange. He found melons and guavas, and breadfruit, the red apple
of Tahiti, and the great Brazilian plum, taro in plenty, and a dozen other good
things—but there were no bananas. This made him unhappy at times, for he
was human.

Though Emmeline had asked Koko for Dick's whereabouts, it was only a remark made
by way of making conversation, for she could hear him in the little cane-brake which
lay close by amidst the trees.

In a few minutes he appeared, dragging after him two canes which he had just cut,
and wiping the perspiration off his brow with his naked arm. He had an old pair of
trousers on—part of the truck salved long ago from the
Shenandoah—nothing else, and he was well worth looking at and considering,
both from a physical and psychological point of view.

Auburn-haired and tall, looking more like seventeen than sixteen, with a restless and
daring expression, half a child, half a man, half a civilised being, half a savage, he had
both progressed and retrograded during the five years of savage life. He sat down
beside Emmeline, flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher's knife
with which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across his knee, he began
whittling at it.

"What are you making?" asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flew into one of
the branches of the artu and rested there, a blue point amidst the dark green.

"Fish-spear," replied Dick.

Without being taciturn, he rarely wasted words. Life was all business for him. He
would talk to Emmeline, but always in short sentences; and he had developed the
habit of talking to inanimate things, to the fish-spear he was carving, or the bowl he
was fashioning from a cocoa-nut.

As for Emmeline, even as a child she had never been talkative. There was something
mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Her mind seemed half submerged
in twilight. Though she spoke little, and though the subject of their conversations was
almost entirely material and relative to their everyday needs, her mind would wander
into abstract fields and the land of chimerae and dreams. What she found there no one
knew—least of all, perhaps, herself.

As for Dick, he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself, as if in a reverie; but if
you caught the words, you would find that they referred to no abstraction, but to some
trifle he had on hand. He seemed entirely bound up in the moment, and to have
forgotten the past as completely as though it had never been.

Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie with his face over a rock-pool by the
hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seen there, or sit in the woods
motionless as a stone, watching the birds and the swift-slipping lizards. The birds
came so close that he could easily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one or
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interfered in any way with the wild life of the woods.

The island, the lagoon, and the reef were for him the three volumes of a great picture
book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a different manner. The colour and the
beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in her soul. Her life was a long reverie, a
beautiful vision—troubled with shadows. Across all the blue and coloured
spaces that meant months and years she could still see as in a glass dimly the
Northumberland, smoking against the wild background of fog; her uncle's face,
Boston—a vague and dark picture beyond a storm—and nearer, the
tragic form on the reef that still haunted terribly her dreams. But she never spoke of
these things to Dick. Just as she kept the secret of what was in her box, and the secret
of her trouble whenever she lost it, she kept the secret of her feelings about these
things.

Born of these things there remained with her always a vague terror: the terror of
losing Dick. Mrs Stannard, her uncle, the dim people she had known in Boston, all had
passed away out of her life like a dream and shadows. The other one too, most
horribly. What if Dick were taken from her as well?

This haunting trouble had been with her a long time; up to a few months ago it had
been mainly personal and selfish—the dread of being left alone. But lately it
had altered and become more acute. Dick had changed in her eyes, and the fear was
now for him. Her own personality had suddenly and strangely become merged in his.
The idea of life without him was unthinkable, yet the trouble remained, a menace in
the blue.

Some days it would be worse than others. To-day, for instance, it was worse than
yesterday, as though some danger had crept close to them during the night. Yet the
sky and sea were stainless, the sun shone on tree and flower, the west wind brought
the tune of the far-away reef like a lullaby. There was nothing to hint of danger or the
need of distrust.

At last Dick finished his spear and rose to his feet.

"Where are you going?" asked Emmeline.

"The reef," he replied. "The tide's going out."

"I'll go with you," said she.

He went into the house and stowed the precious knife away. Then he came out, spear
in one hand, and half a fathom of liana in the other. The liana was for the purpose of
stringing the fish on, should the catch be large. He led the way down the grassy sward
to the lagoon where the dinghy lay, close up to the bank, and moored to a post driven
into the soft soil. Emmeline got in, and, taking the sculls, he pushed off. The tide was
going out.

I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from the shore. The lagoon was
so shallow that at low tide one could have waded almost right across it, were it not for
pot-holes here and there—ten-feet traps—and great beds of rotten coral,
into which one would sink as into brushwood, to say nothing of the nettle coral that
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stings like a bed of nettles. There were also other dangers. Tropical shallows are full
of wild surprises in the way of life and death.

Dick had long ago marked out in his memory the soundings of the lagoon, and it was
fortunate that he possessed the special sense of location which is the main stand-by of
the hunter and the savage, for, from the disposition of the coral in ribs, the water from
the shore edge to the reef ran in lanes. Only two of these lanes gave a clear, fair way
from the shore edge to the reef; had you followed the others, even in a boat of such
shallow draught as the dinghy, you would have found yourself stranded half-way
across, unless, indeed, it were a spring tide.

Half-way across the sound of the surf on the barrier became louder, and the
everlasting and monotonous cry of the gulls came on the breeze. It was lonely out
here, and, looking back, the shore seemed a great way off. It was lonelier still on the
reef.

Dick tied up the boat to a projection of coral, and helped Emmeline to land. The sun
was creeping down into the west, the tide was nearly half out, and large pools of water
lay glittering like burnished shields in the sunlight. Dick, with his precious spear
beside him, sat calmly down on a ledge of coral, and began to divest himself of his one
and only garment.

Emmeline turned away her head and contemplated the distant shore, which seemed
thrice as far off as it was in reality. When she turned her head again he was racing
along the edge of the surf. He and his spear silhouetted against the spindrift and
dazzling foam formed a picture savage enough, and well in keeping with the general
desolation of the background. She watched him lie down and cling to a piece of coral,
whilst the surf rushed round and over him, and then rise and shake himself like a dog,
and pursue his gambols, his body all glittering with the wet.

Sometimes a whoop would come on the breeze, mixing with the sound of the surf and
the cry of the gulls, and she would see him plunge his spear into a pool, and the next
moment the spear would be held aloft with something struggling and glittering at the
end of it.

He was quite different out here on the reef to what he was ashore. The surroundings
here seemed to develop all that was savage in him, in a startling way; and he would
kill, and kill, just for the pleasure of killing, destroying more fish than they could
possibly use.

CHAPTER III

THE DEMON OF THE REEF

The romance of coral has still to be written. There still exists a widespread opinion
that the coral reef and the coral island are the work of an "insect." This fabulous
insect, accredited with the genius of Brunel and the patience of Job, has been
humorously enough held up before the children of many generations as an example of
industry—a thing to be admired, a model to be followed.
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As a matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of
ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his
scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not
even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to
himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house—mark
you, the sea does the building—he dies, and he leaves his house behind
him—and a reputation for industry, beside which the reputation of the ant turns
pale, and that of the bee becomes of little account.

On a coral reef you are treading on rock that the reef-building polypifers of ages have
left behind them as evidences of their idle and apparently useless lives. You might
fancy that the reef is formed of dead rock, but it is not: that is where the wonder of the
thing comes in—a coral reef is half alive. If it were not, it would not resist the
action of the sea ten years. The live part of the reef is just where the breakers come in
and beyond. The gelatinous rock-building polypifers die almost at once, if exposed to
the sun or if left uncovered by water.

Sometimes, at very low tide, if you have courage enough to risk being swept away by
the breakers, going as far out on the reef as you can, you may catch a glimpse of them
in their living state—great mounds and masses of what seems rock, but which
is a honeycomb of coral, whose cells are filled with the living polypifers. Those in the
uppermost cells are usually dead, but lower down they are living.

Always dying, always being renewed, devoured by fish, attacked by the

sea—that is the life of a coral reef. It is a thing as living as a cabbage or a tree.
Every storm tears a piece off the reef, which the living coral replaces; wounds occur in
it which actually granulate and heal as wounds do of the human body.

There is nothing, perhaps, more mysterious in nature than this fact of the existence of
a living land: a land that repairs itself, when injured, by vital processes, and resists the
eternal attack of the sea by vital force, especially when we think of the extent of some
of these lagoon islands or atolls, whose existences are an eternal battle with the
waves.

Unlike the island of this story (which is an island surrounded by a barrier reef of coral
surrounding a space of sea—the lagoon), the reef forms the island. The reef
may be grown over by trees, or it may be perfectly destitute of important vegetation,
or it may be crusted with islets. Some islets may exist within the lagoon, but as often
as not it is just a great empty lake floored with sand and coral, peopled with life
different to the life of the outside ocean, protected from the waves, and reflecting the
sky like a mirror.

When we remember that the atoll is a living thing, an organic whole, as full of life,
though not so highly organised, as a tortoise, the meanest imagination must be struck
with the immensity of one of the structures.

Vliegen atoll in the Low Archipelago, measured from lagoon edge to lagoon edge, is
sixty miles long by twenty miles broad, at its broadest part. In the Marshall
Archipelago, Rimsky Korsacoff is fifty-four miles long and twenty miles broad; and
Rimsky Korsacoff is a living thing, secreting, excreting, and growing more highly
organised than the cocoa-nut trees that grow upon its back, or the blossoms that
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powder the hotoo trees in its groves.

The story of coral is the story of a world, and the longest chapter in that story
concerns itself with coral's infinite variety and form.

Out on the margin of the reef where Dick was spearing fish, you might have seen a
peach-blossom-coloured lichen on the rock. This lichen was a form of coral. Coral
growing upon coral, and in the pools at the edge of the surf branching corals also of
the colour of a peach-bloom.

Within a hundred yards of where Emmeline was sitting, the pools contained corals of
all colours, from lake-red to pure white, and the lagoon behind her—corals of
the quaintest and strangest forms.

Dick had speared several fish, and had left them lying on the reef to be picked up later
on. Tired of killing, he was now wandering along, examining the various living things
he came across.

Huge slugs inhabited the reef, slugs as big as parsnips, and somewhat of the same
shape; they were a species of Bech de mer. Globeshaped jelly-fish as big as oranges,
great cuttlefish bones flat and shining and white, shark's teeth, spines of echini;
sometimes a dead scarus fish, its stomach distended with bits of coral on which it had
been feeding; crabs, sea urchins, sea-weeds of strange colour and shape; star-fish,
some tiny and of the colour of cayenne pepper, some huge and pale. These and a
thousand other things, beautiful or strange, were to be found on the reef.

Dick had laid his spear down, and was exploring a deep bath-like pool. He had waded
up to his knees, and was in the act of wading further when he was suddenly seized by
the foot. It was just as if his ankle had been suddenly caught in a clove hitch and the
rope drawn tight. He screamed out with pain and terror, and suddenly and viciously a
whip-lash shot out from the water, lassoed him round the left knee, drew itself taut,
and held him.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT BEAUTY CONCEALED

Emmeline, seated on the coral rock, had almost forgotten Dick for a moment. The sun
was setting, and the warm amber light of the sunset shone on reef and rock-pool. Just
at sunset and low tide the reef had a peculiar fascination for her. It had the low-tide
smell of sea-weed exposed to the air, and the torment and trouble of the breakers
seemed eased. Before her, and on either side, the foam-dashed coral glowed in amber
and gold, and the great Pacific came glassing and glittering in, voiceless and peaceful,
till it reached the strand and burst into song and spray.

Here, just as on the hill-top at the other side of the island, you could mark the rhythm
of the rollers. "Forever, and forever—forever, and forever," they seemed to say.

The cry of the gulls came mixed with the spray on the breeze. They haunted the reef
like uneasy spirits, always complaining, never at rest; but at sunset their cry seemed
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farther away and less melancholy, perhaps because just then the whole island world
seemed bathed in the spirit of peace.

She turned from the sea prospect and looked backwards over the lagoon to the island.
She could make out the broad green glade beside which their little house lay, and a
spot of yellow, which was the thatch of the house, just by the artu tree, and nearly
hidden by the shadow of the breadfruit. Over woods the fronds of the great cocoa-nut
palms showed above every other tree silhouetted against the dim, dark blue of the
eastern sky.

Seen by the enchanted light of sunset, the whole picture had an unreal look, more
lovely than a dream. At dawn—and Dick would often start for the reef before
dawn, if the tide served—the picture was as beautiful; more so, perhaps, for
over the island, all in shadow, and against the stars, you would see the palm-tops
catching fire, and then the light of day coming through the green trees and blue sky,
like a spirit, across the blue lagoon, widening and strengthening as it widened across
the white foam, out over the sea, spreading like a fan, till, all at once, night was day,
and the gulls were crying and the breakers flashing, the dawn wind blowing, and the
palm trees bending, as palm trees only know how. Emmeline always imagined herself
alone on the island with Dick, but beauty was there, too, and beauty is a great
companion.

The girl was contemplating the scene before her. Nature in her friendliest mood
seemed to say, "Behold me! Men call me cruel; men have called me deceitful, even
treacherous. I—ah well! my answer is, `Behold me!'"

The girl was contemplating the specious beauty of it all, when on the breeze from
seaward came a shout. She turned quickly. There was Dick up to his knees in a
rockpool a hundred yards or so away, motionless, his arms upraised, and crying out
for help. She sprang to her feet.

There had once been an islet on this part of the reef, a tiny thing, consisting of a few
palms and a handful of vegetation, and destroyed, perhaps, in some great storm. I
mention this because the existence of this islet once upon a time was the means,
indirectly, of saving Dick's life; for where these islets have been or are, "flats" occur
on the reef formed of coral conglomerate.

Emmeline in her bare feet could never have reached him in time over rough coral, but,
fortunately, this flat and comparatively smooth surface lay between them.

"My spear!" shouted Dick, as she approached.

He seemed at first tangled in brambles; then she thought ropes were tangling round
him and tying him to something in the water—whatever it was, it was most
awful, and hideous, and like a nightmare. She ran with the speed of Atalanta to the
rock where the spear was resting, all red with the blood of new-slain fish, a foot from
the point.

As she approached Dick, spear in hand, she saw, gasping with terror, that the ropes
were alive, and that they were flickering and rippling over his back. One of them
bound his left arm to his side, but his right arm was free.
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"Quick!" he shouted.

In a second the spear was in his free hand, and Emmeline had cast herself down on
her knees, and was staring with terrified eyes into the water of the pool from whence
the ropes issued. She was, despite her terror, quite prepared to fling herself in and do
battle with the thing, whatever it might be.

What she saw was only for a second. In the deep water of the pool, gazing up and
forward and straight at Dick, she saw a face, lugubrious and awful. The eyes were
wide as saucers, stony and steadfast; a large, heavy, parrot-like beak hung before the
eyes, and worked and wobbled, and seemed to beckon. But what froze one's heart was
the expression of the eyes, so stony and lugubrious, so passionless, so devoid of
speculation, yet so fixed of purpose and full of fate.

From away far down he had risen with the rising tide. He had been feeding on crabs,
when the tide, betraying him, had gone out, leaving him trapped in the rock-pool. He
had slept, perhaps, and awakened to find a being, naked and defenceless, invading his
pool. He was quite small, as octopods go, and young, yet he was large and powerful
enough to have drowned an ox.

The octopod has only been described once, in stone, by a Japanese artist. The statue is
still extant, and it is the most terrible masterpiece of sculpture ever executed by
human hands. It represents a man who has been bathing on a low-tide beach, and has
been caught. The man is shouting in a delirium of terror, and threatening with his free
arm the spectre that has him in its grip. The eyes of the octopod are fixed upon the
man—passionless and lugubrious eyes, but steadfast and fixed.

Another whip-lash shot out of the water in a shower of spray, and seized Dick by the
left thigh. At the same instant he drove the point of the spear through the right eye of
the monster, deep down through eye and soft gelatinous carcass till the spear-point
dirled and splintered against the rock. At the same moment the water of the pool
became black as ink, the bands around him relaxed, and he was free.

Emmeline rose up and seized him, sobbing and clinging to him, and kissing him. He
clasped her with his left arm round her body, as if to protect her, but it was a
mechanical action. He was not thinking of her. Wild with rage, and uttering hoarse
cries, he plunged the broken spear again and again into the depths of the pool,
seeking utterly to destroy the enemy that had so lately had him in its grip. Then slowly
he came to himself, and wiped his forehead, and looked at the broken spear in his
hand.

"Beast!" he said. "Did you see its eyes? Did you see its eyes? I wish it had a hundred
eyes, and I had a hundred spears to drive into them!"

She was clinging to him, and sobbing and laughing hysterically, and praising him. One
might have thought that he had rescued her from death, not she him.

The sun had nearly vanished, and he led her back to where the dinghy was moored,
recapturing and putting on his trousers on the road. He picked up the dead fish he had
speared; and as he rowed her back across the lagoon, he talked and laughed,
recounting the incidents of the fight, taking all the glory of the thing to himself, and
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seeming quite to ignore the important part she had played in it.

This was not from any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from the fact that
for the last five years he had been the be-all and end-all of their tiny
community—the Imperial master. And he would just as soon have thought of
thanking her for handing him the spear as of thanking his right hand for driving it
home. She was quite content, seeking neither thanks nor praise. Everything she had
came from him: she was his shadow and his slave. He was her sun.

He went over the fight again and again before they lay down to rest, telling her he had
done this and that, and what he would do to the next beast of the sort. The reiteration
was tiresome enough, or would have been to an outside listener, but to Emmeline it
was better than Homer. People's minds do not improve in an intellectual sense when
they are isolated from the world, even though they are living the wild and happy lives
of savages.

Then Dick lay down in the dried ferns and covered himself with a piece of the striped
flannel which they used for blanketing, and he snored, and chattered in his sleep like a
dog hunting imaginary game, and Emmeline lay beside him wakeful and thinking. A
new terror had come into her life. She had seen death for the second time, but this
time active and in being.

CHAPTER V

THE SOUND OF A DRUM

The next day Dick was sitting under the shade of the artu. He had the box of fishhooks
beside him, and he was bending a line on to one of them. There had originally been a
couple of dozen hooks, large and small, in the box; there remained now only
six—four small and two large ones. It was a large one he was fixing to the line,
for he intended going on the morrow to the old place to fetch some bananas, and on
the way to try for a fish in the deeper parts of the lagoon.

It was late afternoon, and the heat had gone out of the day. Emmeline, seated on the
grass opposite to him, was holding the end of the line, whilst he got the kinks out of it,
when suddenly she raised her head.

There was not a breath of wind; the hush of the far-distant surf came through the blue
weather—the only audible sound except, now and then, a movement and flutter
from the bird perched in the branches of the artu. All at once another sound mixed
itself with the voice of the surf—a faint, throbbing sound, like the beating of a
distant drum.

"Listen!" said Emmeline.

Dick paused for a moment in his work. All the sounds of the island were familiar: this
was something quite strange.

Faint and far away, now rapid, now slow; coming from where, who could say?
Sometimes it seemed to come from the sea, sometimes, if the fancy of the listener
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turned that way, from the woods. As they listened, a sigh came from overhead; the
evening breeze had risen and was moving in the leaves of the artu tree. Just as you
might wipe a picture off a slate, the breeze banished the sound. Dick went on with his
work.

Next morning early he embarked in the dinghy. He took the hook and line with him,
and some raw fish for bait. Emmeline helped him to push off, and stood on the bank
waving her hand as he rounded the little cape covered with wild cocoa-nut.

These expeditions of Dick's were one of her sorrows. To be left alone was frightful; yet
she never complained. She was living in a paradise, but something told her that
behind all that sun, all that splendour of blue sea and sky, behind the flowers and the
leaves, behind all that specious and simpering appearance of happiness in nature,
lurked a frown, and the dragon of mischance.

Dick rowed for about a mile, then he shipped his sculls, and let the dinghy float. The
water here was very deep; so deep that, despite its clearness, the bottom was
invisible; the sunlight over the reef struck through it diagonally, filling it with
sparkles.

The fisherman baited his hook with a piece from the belly of a scarus and lowered it
down out of sight, then he belayed the line to a thole pin, and, sitting in the bottom of
the boat, hung his head over the side and gazed deep down into the water. Sometimes
there was nothing to see but just the deep blue of the water. Then a flight of spangled
arrowheads would cross the line of sight and vanish, pursued by a form like a moving
bar of gold. Then a great fish would materialise itself and hang in the shadow of the
boat motionless as a stone, save for the movement of its gills; next moment with a
twist of the tail it would be gone.

Suddenly the dinghy shored over, and might have capsized, only for the fact that Dick
was sitting on the opposite side to the side from which the line hung. Then the boat
righted; the line slackened, and the surface of the lagoon, a few fathoms away, boiled
as if being stirred from below by a great silver stick. He had hooked an albicore. He
tied the end of the fishing-line to a scull, undid the line from the thole pin, and flung
the scull overboard.

He did all this with wonderful rapidity, while the line was still slack. Next moment the
scull was rushing over the surface of the lagoon, now towards the reef, now towards
the shore, now flat, now end up. Now it would be jerked under the surface entirely;
vanish for a moment, and then reappear. It was a most astonishing thing to watch, for
the scull seemed alive—viciously alive, and imbued with some destructive
purpose; as, in fact, it was. The most venomous of living things, and the most
intelligent could not have fought the great fish better.

The albicore would make a frantic dash down the lagoon, hoping, perhaps, to find in
the open sea a release from his foe. Then, half drowned with the pull of the scull, he
would pause, dart from side to side in perplexity, and then make an equally frantic
dash up the lagoon, to be checked in the same manner. Seeking the deepest depths,
he would sink the scull a few fathoms; and once he sought the air, leaping into the
sunlight like a crescent of silver, whilst the splash of him as he fell echoed amidst the
trees bordering the lagoon. An hour passed before the great fish showed signs of
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weakening.

The struggle had taken place up to this close to the shore, but now the scull swam out
into the broad sheet of sunlit water, and slowly began to describe large circles rippling
up the peaceful blue into flashing wavelets. It was a melancholy sight to watch, for the
great fish had made a good fight, and one could see him, through the eye of
imagination, beaten, half drowned, dazed, and moving as is the fashion of dazed things
in a circle.

Dick, working the remaining oar at the stern of the boat, rowed out and seized the
floating scull, bringing it on board. Foot by foot he hauled his catch towards the boat
till the long gleaming line of the thing came dimly into view.

The fight had been heard for miles through the lagoon water by all sorts of swimming
things. The lord of the place had got sound of it. A dark fin rippled the water; and as
Dick, pulling on his line, hauled his catch closer, a monstrous grey shadow stained the
depths, and the glittering streak that was the albicore vanished as if engulfed in a
cloud. The line came in slack, and Dick hauled in the albicore's head. It had been
divided from the body as if with a huge pair of shears. The grey shadow slipped by the
boat, and Dick, mad with rage, shouted and shook his fist at it; then, seizing the
albicore's head, from which he had taken the hook, he hurled it at the monster in the
water.

The great shark, with a movement of the tail that caused the water to swirl and the
dinghy to rock, turned upon his back and engulfed the head; then he slowly sank and
vanished, just as if he had been dissolved. He had come off best in this their first
encounter—such as it was.

CHAPTER VI

SAILS UPON THE SEA

Dick put the hook away and took to the sculls. He had a three-mile row before him,
and the tide was coming in, which did not make it any the easier. As he rowed, he
talked and grumbled to himself. He had been in a grumbling mood for some time past:
the chief cause, Emmeline.

In the last few months she had changed; even her face had changed. A new person
had come upon the island, it seemed to him, and taken the place of the Emmeline he
had known from earliest childhood. This one looked different. He did not know that
she had grown beautiful, he just knew that she looked different; also she had
developed new ways that displeased him—she would go off and bathe by
herself, for instance.

Up to six months or so ago he had been quite contented; sleeping and eating, and
hunting for food and cooking it, building and rebuilding the house, exploring the
woods and the reef. But lately a spirit of restlessness had come upon him; he did not
know exactly what he wanted. He had a vague feeling that he wanted to go away from
the place where he was; not from the island, but from the place where they had
pitched their tent, or rather built their house.
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It may have been the spirit of civilisation crying out in him, telling him of all he was
missing. Of the cities, and the streets, and the houses, and the businesses, and the
striving after gold, the striving after power. It may have been simply the man in him
crying out for Love, and not knowing yet that Love was at his elbow.

The dinghy glided along, hugging the shore, past the little glades of fern and the
cathedral gloom of the breadfruit; then, rounding a promontory, she opened the view
of the break in the reef. A little bit of the white strand was visible, but he was not
looking that way—he was looking towards the reef at a tiny, dark spot, not
noticeable unless searched for by the eye. Always when he came on these expeditions,
just here, he would hang on his oars and gaze over there, where the gulls were flying
and the breakers thundering.

A few years ago the spot filled him with dread as well as curiosity, but from familiarity
and the dullness that time casts on everything, the dread had almost vanished, but the
curiosity remained: the curiosity that makes a child look on at the slaughter of an
animal even though his soul revolts at it. He gazed for a while, then he went on
pulling, and the dinghy approached the beach.

Something had happened on the beach. The sand was all trampled, and stained red
here and there; in the centre lay the remains of a great fire still smouldering, and just
where the water lapped the sand, lay two deep grooves as if two heavy boats had been
beached there. A South Sea man would have told from the shape of the grooves, and
the little marks of the out-riggers, that two heavy canoes had been beached there. And
they had.

The day before, early in the afternoon, two canoes, possibly from that far-away island
which cast a stain on the horizon to the sou'-sou'-west, had entered the lagoon, one in
pursuit of the other.

What happened then had better be left veiled. A war drum with a shark-skin head had
set the woods throbbing; the victory was celebrated all night, and at dawn the victors
manned the two canoes and set sail for the home, or hell, they had come from. Had
you examined the strand you would have found that a line had been drawn across the
beach, beyond which there were no footmarks: that meant that the rest of the island
was for some reason tabu.

Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a bit on the strand, then he looked around him. He
picked up a broken spear that had been cast away or forgotten; it was made of some
hard wood and barbed with iron. On the right-hand side of the beach something lay
between the cocoa-nut trees. He approached; it was a mass of offal; the entrails of a
dozen sheep seemed cast here in one mound, yet there were no sheep on the island,
and sheep are not carried as a rule in war canoes.

The sand on the beach was eloquent. The foot pursuing and the foot pursued; the knee
of the fallen one, and then the forehead and outspread hands; the heel of the chief
who has slain his enemy, beaten the body flat, burst a hole through it, through which
he has put his head, and who stands absolutely wearing his enemy as a cloak; the head
of the man dragged on his back to be butchered like a sheep—of these things
spoke the sand.
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As far as the sand traces could speak, the story of the battle was still being told; the
screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubs and spears were gone, yet the ghost of
the fight remained.

If the sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say that the plastic
aether was destitute of the story of the fight and the butchery?

However that may have been, Dick, looking around him, had the shivering sense of
having just escaped from danger. Whoever had been, had gone—he could tell
that by the canoe traces. Gone either out to sea, or up the right stretch of the lagoon.
It was important to determine this.

He climbed to the hill-top and swept the sea with his eyes. There, away to the
south-west, far away on the sea, he could distinguish the brown sails of two canoes.
There was something indescribably mournful and lonely in their appearance; they
looked like withered leaves—brown moths blown to sea—derelicts of
autumn. Then, remembering the beach, these things became freighted with the most
sinister thoughts for the mind of the gazer. They were hurrying away, having done
their work. That they looked lonely and old and mournful, and like withered leaves
blown across the sea, only heightened the horror.

Dick had never seen canoes before, but he knew that these things were boats of some
sort holding people, and that the people had left all those traces on the beach. How
much of the horror of the thing was revealed to his subconscious intelligence, who can
say?

He had climbed the boulder, and he now sat down with his knees drawn up, and his
hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this side of the island,
something happened of a fateful or sinister nature. The last time he had nearly lost the
dinghy; he had beached the little boat in such a way that she floated off, and the tide
was just in the act of stealing her, and sweeping her from the lagoon out to sea, when
he returned laden with his bananas, and, rushing into the water up to his waist, saved
her. Another time he had fallen out of a tree, and just by a miracle escaped death.
Another time a hurricane had broken, lashing the lagoon into snow, and sending the
cocoa-nuts bounding and flying like tennis balls across the strand. This time he had
just escaped something, he knew not exactly what. It was almost as if Providence were
saying to him, "Don't come here."

He watched the brown sails as they dwindled in the wind-blown blue, then he came
down from the hill-top and cut his bananas. He cut four large bunches, which caused
him to make two journeys to the boat. When the bananas were stowed he pushed off.

For a long time a great curiosity had been pulling at his heart-strings: a curiosity of
which he was dimly ashamed. Fear had given it birth, and Fear still clung to it. It was,
perhaps, the element of fear and the awful delight of daring the unknown that made
him give way to it.

He had rowed, perhaps, a hundred yards when he turned the boat's head and made
for the reef. It was more than five years since that day when he rowed across the
lagoon, Emmeline sitting in the stern, with her wreath of flowers in her hand. It might
have been only yesterday, for everything seemed just the same. The thunderous surf
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and the flying gulls, the blinding sunlight, and the salt, fresh smell of the sea. The
palm tree at the entrance of the lagoon still bent gazing into the water, and round the
projection of coral to which he had last moored the boat still lay a fragment of the
rope which he had cut in his hurry to escape.

Ships had come into the lagoon, perhaps, during the five years, but no one had noticed
anything on the reef, for it was only from the hill-top that a full view of what was there
could be seen, and then only by eyes knowing where to look. From the beach there
was visible just a speck. It might have been, perhaps, a bit of old wreckage flung there
by a wave in some big storm. A piece of old wreckage that had been tossed hither and
thither for years, and had at last found a place of rest.

Dick tied the boat up, and stepped on to the reef. It was high tide just as before; the
breeze was blowing strongly, and overhead a man-of-war's bird, black as ebony, with a
blood-red bill, came sailing, the wind doming out his wings. He circled in the air, and
cried out fiercely, as if resenting the presence of the intruder, then he passed away,
let himself be blown away, as it were, across the lagoon, wheeled, circled, and passed
out to sea.

Dick approached the place he knew, and there lay the little old barrel all warped by
the powerful sun; the staves stood apart, and the hooping was rusted and broken, and
whatever it had contained in the way of spirit and conviviality had long ago drained
away.

Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay a few rags of cloth. The skull had
fallen to one side, and the lower jaw had fallen from the skull; the bones of the hands
and feet were still articulated, and the ribs had not fallen in. It was all white and
bleached, and the sun shone on it as indifferently as on the coral, this shell and
framework that had once been a man. There was nothing dreadful about it, but a
whole world of wonder.

To Dick, who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had not learned to
associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, and hell, the thing spoke as it
never could have spoken to you or me.

Looking at it, things linked themselves together in his mind: the skeletons of birds he
had found in the woods, the fish he had slain, even trees lying dead and
rotten—even the shells of crabs.

If you had asked him what lay before him, and if he could have expressed the thought
in his mind, he would have answered you "change."

All the philosophy in the world could not have told him more than he knew just then
about death—he, who even did not know its name.

He was held spellbound by the marvel and miracle of the thing and the thoughts that
suddenly crowded his mind like a host of spectres for whom a door has just been
opened.

Just as a child by unanswerable logic knows that a fire which has burned him once will
burn him again, or will burn another person, he knew that just as the form before him
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was, his form would be some day—and Emmeline's.

Then came the vague question which is born not of the brain, but the heart, and which
is the basis of all religions—where shall I be then? His mind was not of an
introspective nature, and the question just strayed across it and was gone. And still
the wonder of the thing held him. He was for the first time in his life in a reverie; the
corpse that had shocked and terrified him five years ago had cast seeds of thought
with its dead fingers upon his mind, the skeleton had brought them to maturity. The
full fact of universal death suddenly appeared before him, and he recognised it.

He stood for a long time motionless, and then with a deep sigh turned to the boat and
pushed off without once looking back at the reef. He crossed the lagoon and rowed
slowly homewards, keeping in the shelter of the tree shadows as much as possible.

Even looking at him from the shore you might have noticed a difference in him. Your
savage paddles his canoe, or sculls his boat, alert, glancing about him, at touch with
nature at all points; though he be lazy as a cat and sleeps half the day, awake he is all
ears and eyes—a creature reacting to the least external impression.

Dick, as he rowed back, did not look about him: he was thinking or retrospecting. The
savage in him had received a check. As he turned the little cape where the wild
cocoanut blazed, he looked over his shoulder. A figure was standing on the sward by
the edge of the water. It was Emmeline.

CHAPTER VII

THE SCHOONER
They carried the bananas up to the house, and hung them from a branch of the artu.
Then Dick, on his knees, lit the fire to prepare the evening meal. When it was over he
went down to where the boat was moored, and returned with something in his hand. It
was the javelin with the iron point or, rather, the two pieces of it. He had said nothing
of what he had seen to the girl.

Emmeline was seated on the grass; she had a long strip of the striped flannel stuff
about her, worn like a scarf, and she had another piece in her hand which she was
hemming. The bird was hopping about, pecking at a banana which they had thrown to
him; a light breeze made the shadow of the artu leaves dance upon the grass, and the
serrated leaves of the breadfruit to patter one on the other with the sound of
rain-drops falling upon glass.

"Where did you get it?" asked Emmeline, staring at the piece of the javelin which Dick
had flung down almost beside her whilst he went into the house to fetch the knife.

"It was on the beach over there," he replied, taking his seat and examining the two
fragments to see how he could splice them together.

Emmeline looked at the pieces, putting them together in her mind. She did not like the
look of the thing: so keen and savage, and stained dark a foot and more from the
point.
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"People had been there," said Dick, putting the two pieces together and examining the
fracture critically.

"Where?"

"Over there. This was lying on the sand, and the sand was all trod up."

"Dick," said Emmeline, "who were the people?"

"I don't know; I went up the hill and saw their boats going away—far away out.
This was lying on the sand."

"Dick," said Emmeline, "do you remember the noise yesterday?"

"Yes," said Dick.

"I heard it in the night."

"When?"

"In the night before the moon went away."

"That was them," said Dick.

"Dick!"

"Yes?"

"Who were they?"

"I don't know," replied Dick.

"It was in the night, before the moon went away, and it went on and on beating in the
trees. I thought I was asleep, and then I knew I was awake; you were asleep, and I
pushed you to listen, but you couldn't wake, you were so asleep; then the moon went
away, and the noise went on. How did they make the noise?"

"I don't know," replied Dick, "but it was them; and they left this on the sand, and the
sand was all trod up, and I saw their boats from the hill, away out far."

"I thought I heard voices," said Emmeline, "but I was not sure."

She fell into meditation, watching her companion at work on the savage and
sinister-looking thing in his hands. He was splicing the two pieces together with a
strip of the brown cloth-like stuff which is wrapped round the stalks of the cocoa-palm
fronds. The thing seemed to have been hurled here out of the blue by some unseen
hand.

When he had spliced the pieces, doing so with marvellous dexterity, he took the thing
short down near the point, and began thrusting it into the soft earth to clean it; then,
with a bit of flannel, he polished it till it shone. He felt a keen delight in it. It was
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useless as a fish-spear, because it had no barb, but it was a weapon. It was useless as
a weapon, because there was no foe on the island to use it against; still, it was a
weapon.

When he had finished scrubbing at it, he rose, hitched his old trousers up, tightened
the belt of cocoa-cloth which Emmeline had made for him, went into the house and got
his fish-spear, and stalked off to the boat, calling out to Emmeline to follow him. They
crossed over to the reef, where, as usual, he divested himself of clothing.

It was strange that out here he would go about stark naked, yet on the island he
always wore some covering. But not so strange, perhaps, after all.

The sea is a great purifier, both of the mind and the body; before that great sweet
spirit people do not think in the same way as they think far inland. What woman would
appear in a town or on a country road, or even bathing in a river, as she appears
bathing in the sea?

Some instinct made Dick cover himself up on shore, and strip naked on the reef. In a
minute he was down by the edge of the surf, javelin in one hand, fish-spear in the
other.

Emmeline, by a little pool the bottom of which was covered with branching coral, sat
gazing down into its depths, lost in a reverie like that into which we fall when gazing
at shapes in the fire. She had sat some time like this when a shout from Dick aroused
her. She started to her feet and gazed to where he was pointing. An amazing thing
was there.

To the east, just rounding the curve of the reef, and scarcely a quarter of a mile from
it, was coming a big topsail schooner; a beautiful sight she was, heeling to the breeze
with every sail drawing, and the white foam like a feather at her fore-foot.

Dick, with the javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her; he had dropped his
fishspear, and he stood as motionless as though he were carved out of stone.
Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him; neither of them spoke a word as the vessel
drew closer.

Everything was visible, so close was she now, from the reef points on the great
mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing of a gull, to the rail of the
bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the port bulwarks gazing at the island
and the figures on the reef. Browned by the sun and sea-breeze, Emmeline's hair
blowing on the wind, and the point of Dick's javelin flashing in the sun, they looked an
ideal pair of savages, seen from the schooner's deck.

"They are going away," said Emmeline, with a long-drawn breath of relief.

Dick made no reply; he stared at the schooner a moment longer in silence, then,
having made sure that she was standing away from the land, he began to run up and
down, calling out wildly, and beckoning to the vessel as if to call her back.

A moment later a sound came on the breeze, a faint hail; a flag was run up to the peak
and dipped as in derision, and the vessel continued on her course.
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As a matter of fact, she had been on the point of putting about. Her captain had for a
moment been undecided as to whether the forms on the reef were those of castaways
or savages. But the javelin in Dick's hand had turned the scale of his opinion in favour
of the theory of savages.

CHAPTER VIII

LOVE STEPS IN
Two birds were sitting in the branches of the artu tree: Koko had taken a mate. They
had built a nest out of fibres pulled from the wrappings of the cocoa-nut fronds, bits of
stick and wire grass—anything, in fact; even fibres from the palmetto thatch of
the house below. The pilferings of birds, the building of nests, what charming
incidents they are in the great episode of spring!

The hawthorn tree never bloomed here, the climate was that of eternal summer, yet
the spirit of May came just as she comes to the English countryside or the German
forest. The doings in the artu branches greatly interested Emmeline.

The love-making and the nest-building were conducted quite in the usual manner,
according to rules laid down by Nature and carried out by men and birds. All sorts of
quaint sounds came filtering down through the leaves from the branch where the
sapphire-coloured lovers sat side by side, or the fork where the nest was beginning to
form: croonings and cluckings, sounds like the flirting of a fan, the sounds of a
squabble, followed by the sounds that told of the squabble made up. Sometimes after
one of these squabbles a pale blue downy feather or two would come floating
earthwards, touch the palmetto leaves of the house-roof and cling there, or be blown
on to the grass.

It was some days after the appearance of the schooner, and Dick was making ready to
go into the woods and pick guavas. He had all the morning been engaged in making a
basket to carry them in. In civilisation he would, judging from his mechanical talent,
perhaps have been an engineer, building bridges and ships, instead of palmetto-leaf
baskets and cane houses—who knows if he would have been happier?

The heat of midday had passed, when, with the basket hanging over his shoulder on a
piece of cane, he started for the woods, Emmeline following. The place they were
going to always filled her with a vague dread; not for a great deal would she have
gone there alone. Dick had discovered it in one of his rambles.

They entered the wood and passed a little well, a well without apparent source or
outlet and a bottom of fine white sand. How the sand had formed there, it would be
impossible to say; but there it was, and around the margin grew ferns redoubling
themselves on the surface of the crystal-clear water. They left this to the right and
struck into the heart of the wood. The heat of midday still lurked here; the way was
clear, for there was a sort of path between the trees, as if, in very ancient days, there
had been a road.

Right across this path, half lost in shadow, half sunlit, the lianas hung their ropes. The
hotoo tree, with its powdering of delicate blossoms, here stood, showing its lost
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loveliness to the sun; in the shade the scarlet hibiscus burned like a flame. Artu and
breadfruit trees and cocoa-nut bordered the way.

As they proceeded the trees grew denser and the path more obscure. All at once,
rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted with fern. This was the
place that always filled Emmeline with an undefined dread. One side of it was all built
up in terraces with huge blocks of stone—blocks of stone so enormous, that the
wonder was how the ancient builders had put them in their places.

Trees grew along the terraces, thrusting their roots between the interstices of the
blocks. At their base, slightly tilted forward as if with the sinkage of years, stood a
great stone figure roughly carved, thirty feet high at least—mysterious-looking,
the very spirit of the place. This figure and the terraces, the valley itself, and the very
trees that grew there, inspired Emmeline with deep curiosity and vague fear.

People had been here once; sometimes she could fancy she saw dark shadows moving
amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to her to hide voices at times,
even as its shadow concealed forms. It was indeed an uncanny place to be alone in
even under the broad light of day. All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find
relics of the past, like these scattered through the islands.

These temple places are nearly all the same: great terraces of stone, massive idols,
desolation overgrown with foliage. They hint at one religion, and a time when the sea
space of the Pacific was a continent, which, sinking slowly through the ages, has left
only its higher lands and hill-tops visible in the form of islands. Round these places the
woods are thicker than elsewhere, hinting at the presence there, once, of sacred
groves. The idols are immense, their faces are vague; the storms and the suns and the
rains of the ages have cast over them a veil. The sphinx is understandable and a toy
compared to these things, some of which have a stature of fifty feet, whose creation is
veiled in absolute mystery—the gods of a people for ever and for ever lost.

The "stone man" was the name Emmeline had given the idol of the valley; and
sometimes at nights, when her thoughts would stray that way, she would picture him
standing all alone in the moonlight or starlight staring straight before him.

He seemed for ever listening; unconsciously one fell to listening too, and then the
valley seemed steeped in a supernatural silence. He was not good to be alone with.

Emmeline sat down amidst the fears just at his base. When one was close up to him he
lost the suggestion of life, and was simply a great stone which cast a shadow in the
sun.

Dick threw himself down also to rest. Then he rose up and went off amidst the guava
bushes, plucking the fruit and filling his basket. Since he had seen the schooner, the
white men on her decks, her great masts and sails, and general appearance of
freedom and speed and unknown adventure, he had been more than ordinarily glum
and restless. Perhaps he connected her in his mind with the far-away vision of the
Northumberland, and the idea of other places and lands, and the yearning for change
[that] the idea of them inspired.
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He came back with his basket full of the ripe fruit, gave some to the girl and sat down
beside her. When she had finished eating them she took the cane that he used for
carrying the basket and held it in her hands. She was bending it in the form of a bow
when it slipped, flew out and struck her companion a sharp blow on the side of his
face.

Almost on the instant he turned and slapped her on the shoulder. She stared at him for
a moment in troubled amazement, a sob came in her throat. Then some veil seemed
lifted, some wizard's wand stretched out, some mysterious vial broken. As she looked
at him like that, he suddenly and fiercely clasped her in his arms. He held her like this
for a moment, dazed, stupefied, not knowing what to do with her. Then her lips told
him, for they met his in an endless kiss.

CHAPTER IX

THE SLEEP OF PARADISE

The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house under the artu
tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the sea and across the reef.

She lit the lagoon to its dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sand spaces, and
the fish, casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon
rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the mirror-like surface
into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white staring ribs of the form on the
reef. Then, peeping over the trees, she looked down into the valley, where the great
idol of stone had kept its solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, or more.

At his base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings,
naked, clasped in each other's arms, and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil,
had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The
thing had been conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair
absolutely natural, absolutely blameless, and without sin.

It was a marriage according to Nature, without feast or guests, consummated with

accidental cynicism under the shadow of a religion a thousand years dead.

So happy in their ignorance were they, that they only knew that suddenly life had
changed, that the skies and the sea were bluer, and that they had become in some
magical way one a part of the other. The birds on the tree above were equally as
happy in their ignorance, and in their love.

PART II

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AN ISLAND HONEYMOON
One day Dick climbed on to the tree above the house, and, driving Madame Koko off
the nest upon which she was sitting, peeped in. There were several pale green eggs in
it. He did not disturb them, but climbed down again, and the bird resumed her seat as
if nothing had happened. Such an occurrence would have terrified a bird used to the
ways of men, but here the birds were so fearless and so full of confidence that often
they would follow Emmeline in the wood, flying from branch to branch, peering at her
through the leaves, lighting quite close to her—once, even, on her shoulder.

The days passed. Dick had lost his restlessness: his wish to wander had vanished. He
had no reason to wander; perhaps that was the reason why. In all the broad earth he
could not have found anything more desirable than what he had.

Instead now of finding a half-naked savage followed dog-like by his mate, you would
have found of an evening a pair of lovers wandering on the reef. They had in a pathetic
sort of way attempted to adorn the house with a blue flowering creeper taken from the
wood and trained over the entrance.

Emmeline, up to this, had mostly done the cooking, such as it was; Dick helped her
now, always. He talked to her no longer in short sentences flung out as if to a dog; and
she, almost losing the strange reserve that had clung to her from childhood, half
showed him her mind. It was a curious mind: the mind of a dreamer, almost the mind
of a poet. The Cluricaunes dwelt there, and vague shapes born of things she had heard
about or dreamt of: she had thoughts about the sea and stars, the flowers and birds.

Dick would listen to her as she talked, as a man might listen to the sound of a rivulet.
His practical mind could take no share in the dreams of his other half, but her
conversation pleased him.

He would look at her for a long time together, absorbed in thought. He was admiring
her.

Her hair, blue-black and glossy, tangled him in its meshes; he would stroke it, so to
speak, with his eyes, and then pull her close to him and bury his face in it; the smell of
it was intoxicating. He breathed her as one does the perfume of a rose.

Her ears were small, and like little white shells. He would take one between finger
and thumb and play with it as if it were a toy, pulling at the lobe of it, or trying to
flatten out the curved part. Her breasts, her shoulders, her knees, her little feet, every
bit of her, he would examine and play with and kiss. She would lie and let him,
seeming absorbed in some far-away thought, of which he was the object, then all at
once her arms would go round him. All this used to go on in the broad light of day,
under the shadow of the artu leaves, with no one to watch except the bright-eyed birds
in the leaves above.

Not all their time would be spent in this fashion. Dick was just as keen after the fish.
He dug up with a spade—improvised from one of the boards of the
dinghy—a space of soft earth near the taro patch and planted the seeds of
melons he found in the wood; he rethatched the house. They were, in short, as busy as
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they could be in such a climate, but love-making would come on them in fits, and then
everything would be forgotten. Just as one revisits some spot to renew the memory of
a painful or pleasant experience received there, they would return to the valley of the
idol and spend a whole afternoon in its shade. The absolute happiness of wandering
through the woods together, discovering new flowers, getting lost, and finding their
way again, was a thing beyond expression.

Dick had suddenly stumbled upon Love. His courtship had lasted only some twenty
minutes; it was being gone over again now, and extended.

One day, hearing a curious noise from the tree above the house, he climbed it. The
noise came from the nest, which had been temporarily left by the mother bird. It was a
gasping, wheezing sound, and it came from four wide-open beaks, so anxious to be fed
that one could almost see into the very crops of the owners. They were Koko's
children. In another year each of those ugly downy things would, if permitted to live,
be a beautiful sapphire-coloured bird with a few dove-coloured tail feathers, coral
beak, and bright, intelligent eyes. A few days ago each of these things was imprisoned
in a pale green egg. A month ago they were nowhere.

Something hit Dick on the cheek. It was the mother bird returned with food for the
young ones. Dick drew his head aside, and she proceeded without more ado to fill
their crops.

CHAPTER XI

THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE

Months passed away. Only one bird remained in the branches of the artu: Koko's
children and mate had vanished, but he remained. The breadfruit leaves had turned
from green to pale gold and darkest amber, and now the new green leaves were being
presented to the spring.

Dick, who had a complete chart of the lagoon in his head, and knew all the soundings
and best fishing places, the locality of the stinging coral, and the places where you
could wade right across at low tide—Dick, one morning, was gathering his
things together for a fishing expedition. The place he was going to lay some two and a
half miles away across the island, and as the road was bad he was going alone.

Emmeline had been passing a new thread through the beads of the necklace she
sometimes wore. This necklace had a history. In the shallows not far away, Dick had
found a bed of shell-fish; wading out at low tide, he had taken some of them out to
examine. They were oysters. The first one he opened, so disgusting did its appearance
seem to him, might have been the last, only that under the beard of the thing lay a
pearl. It was about twice the size of a large pea, and so lustrous that even he could not
but admire its beauty, though quite unconscious of its value.

He flung the unopened oysters down, and took the thing to Emmeline. Next day,
returning by chance to the same spot, he found the oysters he had cast down all dead
and open in the sun. He examined them, and found another pearl embedded in one of
them. Then he collected nearly a bushel of the oysters, and left them to die and open.
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The idea had occurred to him of making a necklace for his companion. She had one
made of shells, he intended to make her one of pearls.

It took a long time, but it was something to do. He pierced them with a big needle, and
at the end of four months or so the thing was complete. Great pearls most of them
were—pure white, black, pink, some perfectly round, some tear shaped, some
irregular. The thing was worth fifteen, or perhaps twenty thousand pounds, for he only
used the biggest he could find, casting away the small ones as useless.

Emmeline this morning had just finished restringing them on a double thread. She
looked pale and not at all well and had been restless all night.

As he went off, armed with his spear and fishing tackle, she waved her hand to him
without getting up. Usually she followed him a bit into the wood when he was going
away like this, but this morning she just sat at the doorway of the little house, the
necklace in her lap, following him with her eyes until he was lost amidst the trees.

He had no compass to guide him, and he needed none. He knew the woods by heart.
The mysterious line beyond which scarcely an artu tree was to be found. The long
strip of mammee apple—a regular sheet of it a hundred yards broad, and
reaching from the middle of the island right down to the lagoon. The clearings, some
almost circular where the ferns grew knee-deep. Then he came to the bad part.

The vegetation here had burst into a riot. All sorts of great sappy stalks of unknown
plants barred the way and tangled the foot; and there were boggy places into which
one sank horribly. Pausing to wipe one's brow, the stalks and tendrils one had beaten
down, or beaten aside, rose up and closed together, making one a prisoner almost as
closely surrounded as a fly in amber.

All the noontides that had ever fallen upon the island seemed to have left some of their
heat behind them here. The air was damp and close like the air of a laundry; and the
mournful and perpetual buzz of insects filled the silence without destroying it.

A hundred men with scythes might make a road through the place to-day; a month or
two later, searching for the road, you would find none—the vegetation would
have closed in as water closes when divided.

This was the haunt of the jug orchid—a veritable jug, lid and all. Raising the lid
you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above,
between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here
as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and
miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous growth of the
gigantic weeds.

If one had much imagination one felt afraid in this place, for one felt not alone. At any
moment it seemed that one might be touched on the elbow by a hand reaching out
from the surrounding tangle. Even Dick felt this, unimaginative and fearless as he
was. It took him nearly three-quarters of an hour to get through, and then, at last,
came the blessed air of real day, and a glimpse of the lagoon between the tree-boles.
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He would have rowed round in the dinghy, only that at low tide the shallows of the
north of the island were a bar to the boat's passage. Of course he might have rowed all
the way round by way of the strand and reef entrance, but that would have meant a
circuit of six miles or more. When he came between the trees down to the lagoon edge
it was about eleven o'clock in the morning, and the tide was nearly at the full.

The lagoon just here was like a trough, and the reef was very near, scarcely a quarter
of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve, it went down sheer fifty fathoms or
more, and one could fish from the bank just as from a pier head. He had brought some
food with him, and he placed it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had a
lump of coral for a sinker. He baited the hook, and whirling the sinker round in the air
sent it flying out a hundred feet from shore. There was a baby cocoa-nut tree growing
just at the edge of the water. He fastened the end of his line round the narrow stem, in
case of eventualities, and then, holding the line itself, he fished.

He had promised Emmeline to return before sundown.

He was a fisherman. That is to say, a creature with the enduring patience of a cat,
tireless and heedless of time as an oyster. He came here for sport more than for fish.
Large things were to be found in this part of the lagoon. The last time he had hooked a
horror in the form of a cat-fish; at least in outward appearance it was likest to a
Mississippi cat-fish. Unlike the cat-fish, it was coarse and useless as food, but it gave
good sport.

The tide was now going out, and it was at the going-out of the tide that the best
fishing was to be had. There was no wind, and the lagoon lay like a sheet of glass, with
just a dimple here and there where the outgoing tide made a swirl in the water.

As he fished he thought of Emmeline and the little house under the trees. Scarcely one
could call it thinking. Pictures passed before his mind's eye—pleasant and
happy pictures, sunlit, moonlit, starlit.

Three hours passed thus without a bite or symptom that the lagoon contained
anything else but sea-water, and disappointment; but he did not grumble. He was a
fisherman. Then he left the line tied to the tree and sat down to eat the food he had
brought with him. He had scarcely finished his meal when the baby cocoa-nut tree
shivered and became convulsed, and he did not require to touch the taut line to know
that it was useless to attempt to cope with the thing at the end of it. The only course
was to let it tug and drown itself. So he sat down and watched.

After a few minutes the line slackened, and the little cocoa-nut tree resumed its
attitude of pensive meditation and repose. He pulled the line up: there was nothing at
the end of it but a hook. He did not grumble; he baited the hook again, and flung it in,
for it was quite likely that the ferocious thing in the water would bite again.

Full of this idea and heedless of time he fished and waited. The sun was sinking into
the west—he did not heed it. He had quite forgotten that he had promised
Emmeline to return before sunset; it was nearly sunset now. Suddenly, just behind
him, from among the trees, he heard her voice, crying:

"Dick!"
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CHAPTER XII

THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE (continued)

He dropped the line, and turned with a start. There was no one visible. He ran
amongst the trees calling out her name, but only echoes answered. Then he came back
to the lagoon edge.

He felt sure that what he had heard was only fancy, but it was nearly sunset, and more
than time to be off. He pulled in his line, wrapped it up, took his fish-spear and
started.

It was just in the middle of the bad place that dread came to him. What if anything had
happened to her? It was dusk here, and never had the weeds seemed so thick, dimness
so dismal, the tendrils of the vines so gin-like. Then he lost his way—he who
was so sure of his way always! The hunter's instinct had been crossed, and for a time
he went hither and thither helpless as a ship without a compass. At last he broke into
the real wood, but far to the right of where he ought to have been. He felt like a beast
escaped from a trap, and hurried along, led by the sound of the surf.

When he reached the clear sward that led down to the lagoon the sun had just
vanished beyond the sea-line. A streak of red cloud floated like the feather of a
flamingo in the western sky close to the sea, and twilight had already filled the world.
He could see the house dimly, under the shadow of the trees, and he ran towards it,
crossing the sward diagonally.

Always before, when he had been away, the first thing to greet his eyes on his return
had been the figure of Emmeline. Either at the lagoon edge or the house door he
would find her waiting for him.

She was not waiting for him to-night. When he reached the house she was not there,
and he paused, after searching the place, a prey to the most horrible perplexity, and
unable for the moment to think or act.

Since the shock of the occurrence on the reef she had been subjected at times to
occasional attacks of headache; and when the pain was more than she could bear she
would go off and hide. Dick would hunt for her amidst the trees, calling out her name
and hallooing. A faint "halloo" would answer when she heard him, and then he would
find her under a tree or bush, with her unfortunate head between her hands, a picture
of misery.

He remembered this now, and started off along the borders of the wood, calling to
her, and pausing to listen. No answer came.

He searched amidst the trees as far as the little well, waking the echoes with his
voice; then he came back slowly, peering about him in the deep dusk that now was
yielding to the starlight. He sat down before the door of the house, and, looking at
him, you might have fancied him in the last stages of exhaustion. Profound grief and
profound exhaustion act on the frame very much in the same way. He sat with his chin
resting on his chest, his hands helpless. He could hear her voice, still as he heard it
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over at the other side of the island. She had been in danger and called to him, and he
had been calmly fishing, unconscious of it all.

This thought maddened him. He sat up, stared around him and beat the ground with
the palms of his hands; then he sprang to his feet and made for the dinghy. He rowed
to the reef: the action of a madman, for she could not possibly be there.

There was no moon, the starlight both lit and veiled the world, and no sound but the
majestic thunder of the waves. As he stood, the night wind blowing on his face, the
white foam seething before him, and Canopus burning in the great silence overhead,
the fact that he stood in the centre of an awful and profound indifference came to his
untutored mind with a pang.

He returned to the shore: the house was still deserted. A little bowl made from the
shell of a cocoa-nut stood on the grass near the doorway. He had last seen it in her
hands, and he took it up and held it for a moment, pressing it tightly to his breast.
Then he threw himself down before the doorway, and lay upon his face, with head
resting upon his arms in the attitude of a person who is profoundly asleep.

He must have searched through the woods again that night just as a somnambulist
searches, for he found himself towards dawn in the valley before the idol. Then it was
daybreak—the world was full of light and colour. He was seated before the
house door, worn out and exhausted, when, raising his head, he saw Emmeline's
figure coming out from amidst the distant trees on the other side of the sward.

CHAPTER XIII

THE NEWCOMER
He could not move for a moment, then he sprang to his feet and ran towards her. She
looked pale and dazed, and she held something in her arms; something wrapped up in
her scarf. As he pressed her to him, the something in the bundle struggled against his
breast and emitted a squall—just like the squall of a cat. He drew back, and
Emmeline, tenderly moving her scarf a bit aside, exposed a wee face. It was brick-red
and wrinkled; there were two bright eyes, and a tuft of dark hair over the forehead.
Then the eyes closed, the face screwed itself up, and the thing sneezed twice.

"Where did you GET it?" he asked, absolutely lost in astonishment as she covered the
face again gently with the scarf.

"I found it in the woods," replied Emmeline.

Dumb with amazement, he helped her along to the house, and she sat down, resting
her head against the bamboos of the wall.

"I felt so bad," she explained; "and then I went off to sit in the woods, and then I
remembered nothing more, and when I woke up it was there."

"It's a baby!" said Dick.

(continued)
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"I know," replied Emmeline.

Mrs James's baby, seen in the long ago, had risen up before their mind's eyes, a
messenger from the past to explain what the new thing was. Then she told him
things—things that completely shattered the old "cabbage bed" theory,
supplanting it with a truth far more wonderful, far more poetical, too, to he who can
appreciate the marvel and the mystery of life.

"It has something funny tied on to it," she went on, as if she were referring to a parcel
she had just received.

"Let's look," said Dick.

"No," she replied; "leave it alone."

She sat rocking the thing gently, seeming oblivious to the whole world, and quite
absorbed in it, as, indeed, was Dick. A physician would have shuddered, but, perhaps
fortunately enough, there was no physician on the island. Only Nature, and she put
everything to rights in her own time and way.

When Dick had sat marvelling long enough, he set to and lit the fire. He had eaten
nothing since the day before, and he was nearly as exhausted as the girl. He cooked
some breadfruit, there was some cold fish left over from the day before; this, with
some bananas, he served up on two broad leaves, making Emmeline eat first.

Before they had finished, the creature in the bundle, as though it had smelt the food,
began to scream. Emmeline drew the scarf aside. It looked hungry; its mouth would
now be pinched up and now wide open, its eyes opened and closed. The girl touched it
on the lips with her finger, and it seized upon her fingertip and sucked it. Her eyes
filled with tears, she looked appealingly at Dick, who was on his knees; he took a
banana, peeled it, broke off a bit and handed it to her. She approached it to the baby's
mouth. It tried to suck it, failed, blew bubbles at the sun and squalled.

"Wait a minute," said Dick.

There were some green cocoa-nuts he had gathered the day before close by. He took
one, removed the green husk, and opened one of the eyes, making an opening also in
the opposite side of the shell. The unfortunate infant sucked ravenously at the nut,
filled its stomach with the young cocoa-nut juice, vomited violently, and wailed.
Emmeline in despair clasped it to her naked breast, wherefrom, in a moment, it was
hanging like a leech. It knew more about babies than they did.

CHAPTER XIV

HANNAH
At noon, in the shallows of the reef, under the burning sun, the water would be quite
warm. They would carry the baby down here, and Emmeline would wash it with a bit
of flannel. After a few days it scarcely ever screamed, even when she washed it. It
would lie on her knees during the process, striking valiantly out with its arms and
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legs, staring straight up at the sky. Then when she turned it on its face, it would lay its
head down and chuckle, and blow bubbles at the coral of the reef, examining,
apparently, the pattern of the coral with deep and philosophic attention.

Dick would sit by with his knees up to his chin, watching it all. He felt himself to be
part proprietor in the thing—as, indeed, he was. The mystery of the affair still
hung over them both. A week ago they two had been alone, and suddenly from
nowhere this new individual had appeared.

It was so complete. It had hair on its head, tiny finger-nails, and hands that would
grasp you. It had a whole host of little ways of its own, and every day added to them.

In a week the extreme ugliness of the newborn child had vanished. Its face, which had
seemed carved in the imitation of a monkey's face from half a brick, became the face
of a happy and healthy baby. It seemed to see things, and sometimes it would laugh
and chuckle as though it had been told a good joke. Its black hair all came off and was
supplanted by a sort of down. It had no teeth. It would lie on its back and kick and
crow, and double its fists up and try to swallow them alternately, and cross its feet and
play with its toes. In fact, it was exactly like any of the thousand-and-one babies that
are born into the world at every tick of the clock.

"What will we call it?" said Dick one day, as he sat watching his son and heir crawling
about on the grass under the shade of the breadfruit leaves.

"Hannah," said Emmeline promptly.

The recollection of another baby once heard about was in her mind, and it was as good
a name as any other, perhaps, in that lonely place, notwithstanding the fact that
Hannah was a boy.

Koko took a vast interest in the new arrival. He would hop round it and peer at it with
his head on one side; and Hannah would crawl after the bird and try to grab it by the
tail. In a few months so valiant and strong did he become that he would pursue his
own father, crawling behind him on the grass, and you might have seen the mother
and father and child playing all together like three children, the bird sometimes
hovering overhead like a good spirit, sometimes joining in the fun.

Sometimes Emmeline would sit and brood over the child, a troubled expression on her
face and a far-away look in her eyes. The old vague fear of mischance had
returned—the dread of that viewless form her imagination half pictured behind
the smile on the face of Nature. Her happiness was so great that she dreaded to lose
it.

There is nothing more wonderful than the birth of a man, and all that goes to bring it
about. Here, on this island, in the very heart of the sea, amidst the sunshine and the
wind-blown trees, under the great blue arch of the sky, in perfect purity of thought,
they would discuss the question from beginning to end without a blush, the object of
their discussion crawling before them on the grass, and attempting to grab feathers
from Koko's tail.
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It was the loneliness of the place as well as their ignorance of life that made the old,
old miracle appear so strange and fresh—as beautiful as the miracle of death
had appeared awful. In thoughts vague and beyond expression in words, they linked
this new occurrence with that old occurrence on the reef six years before. The
vanishing and the coming of a man.

Hannah, despite his unfortunate name, was certainly a most virile and engaging baby.
The black hair which had appeared and vanished like some practical joke played by
Nature, gave place to a down at first as yellow as sun-bleached wheat, but in a few
months' time tinged with auburn.

One day—he had been uneasy and biting at his thumbs for some time
past—Emmeline, looking into his mouth, saw something white and like a grain
of rice protruding from his gum. It was a tooth just born. He could eat bananas now,
and breadfruit, and they often fed him on fish—a fact which again might have
caused a medical man to shudder; yet he throve on it all, and waxed stouter every day.

Emmeline, with a profound and natural wisdom, let him crawl about stark naked,
dressed in ozone and sunlight. Taking him out on the reef, she would let him paddle in
the shallow pools, holding him under the armpits whilst he splashed the
diamond-bright water into spray with his feet, and laughed and shouted.

They were beginning now to experience a phenomenon, as wonderful as the birth of

the child's body—the birth of his intelligence, the peeping out of a little
personality with predilections of its own, likes and dislikes.

He knew Dick from Emmeline; and when Emmeline had satisfied his material wants,
he would hold out his arms to go to Dick if he were by. He looked upon Koko as a
friend, but when a friend of Koko's—a bird with an inquisitive mind and three
red feathers in his tail—dropped in one day to inspect the newcomer, he
resented the intrusion, and screamed.

He had a passion for flowers, or anything bright. He would laugh and shout when
taken on the lagoon in the dinghy, and make as if to jump into the water to get at the
bright-coloured corals below.

Ah me, we laugh at young mothers, and all the miraculous things they tell us about
their babies! They see what we cannot see: the first unfolding of that mysterious
flower, the mind.

One day they were out on the lagoon. Dick had been rowing; he had ceased, and was
letting the boat drift for a bit. Emmeline was dancing the child on her knee, when it
suddenly held out its arms to the oarsman and said:

"Dick!"

The little word, so often heard and easily repeated, was its first word on earth.

A voice that had never spoken in the world before had spoken; and to hear his name
thus mysteriously uttered by a being he has created is the sweetest and perhaps the
saddest thing a man can ever know.
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Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his love for it was more than
his love for Emmeline or anything else on earth.

CHAPTER XV

THE LAGOON OF FIRE

Ever since the tragedy of six years ago there had been forming in the mind of
Emmeline Lestrange a something—shall I call it a deep mistrust? She had never
been clever; lessons had saddened and wearied her, without making her much the
wiser. Yet her mind was of that order into which profound truths come by short-cuts.
She was intuitive.

Great knowledge may lurk in the human mind without the owner of the mind being
aware. He or she acts in such or such a way, or thinks in such and such a manner from
intuition; in other words, as the outcome of the profoundest reasoning.

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when
we have mastered the sailor's horn-book, and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's
anatomy, and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have
become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas;
the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.

Storms had burst over the island before this. And what Emmeline remembered of
them might be expressed by an instance.

The morning would be bright and happy, never so bright the sun, or so balmy the
breeze, or so peaceful the blue lagoon; then, with a horrid suddenness, as if sick with
dissimulation and mad to show itself, something would blacken the sun, and with a
yell stretch out a hand and ravage the island, churn the lagoon into foam, beat down
the coconut trees, and slay the birds. And one bird would be left and another taken,
one tree destroyed and another left standing. The fury of the thing was less fearful
than the blindness of it, and the indifference of it.

One night, when the child was asleep, just after the last star was lit, Dick appeared at
the doorway of the house. He had been down to the water's edge and had now
returned. He beckoned Emmeline to follow him, and, putting down the child, she did
so.

"Come here and look," said he.

He led the way to the water; and as they approached it Emmeline became aware that
there was something strange about the lagoon. From a distance it looked pale and
solid; it might have been a great stretch of grey marble veined with black. Then, as
she drew nearer, she saw that the dull grey appearance was a deception of the eye.

The lagoon was alight and burning.

The phosphoric fire was in its very heart and being; every coral branch was a torch,
every fish a passing lantern. The incoming tide moving the waters made the whole
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glittering floor of the lagoon move and shiver, and the tiny waves to lap the bank,
leaving behind them glow-worm traces.

"Look!" said Dick.

He knelt down and plunged his forearm into the water. The immersed part burned like
a smouldering torch. Emmeline could see it as plainly as though it were lit by sunlight.
Then he drew his arm out, and as far as the water had reached, it was covered by a
glowing glove.

They had seen the phosphorescence of the lagoon before; indeed, any night you might
watch the passing fish like bars of silver, when the moon was away; but this was
something quite new, and it was entrancing.

Emmeline knelt down and dabbled her hands, and made herself a pair of phosphoric
gloves, and cried out with pleasure, and laughed. It was all the pleasure of playing
with fire without the danger of being burnt. Then Dick rubbed his face with the water
till it glowed.

"Wait!" he cried; and, running up to the house, he fetched out Hannah.

He came running down with him to the water's edge, gave Emmeline the child,
unmoored the boat, and started out from shore.

The sculls, as far as they were immersed, were like bars of glistening silver; under
them passed the fish, leaving cometic tails; each coral clump was a lamp, lending its
lustre till the great lagoon was luminous as a lit-up ballroom. Even the child on
Emmeline's lap crowed and cried out at the strangeness of the sight.

They landed on the reef and wandered over the flat. The sea was white and bright as
snow, and the foam looked like a hedge of fire.

As they stood gazing on this extraordinary sight, suddenly, almost as instantaneously

as the switching off of an electric light, the phosphorescence of the sea flickered and
vanished.

The moon was rising. Her crest was just breaking from the water, and as her face
came slowly into view behind a belt of vapour that lay on the horizon, it looked fierce
and red, stained with smoke like the face of Eblis.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CYCLONE
When they awoke next morning the day was dark. A solid roof of cloud, lead-coloured
and without a ripple on it, lay over the sky, almost to the horizon. There was not a
breath of wind, and the birds flew wildly about as if disturbed by some unseen enemy
in the wood.
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As Dick lit the fire to prepare the breakfast, Emmeline walked up and down, holding
her baby to her breast; she felt restless and uneasy.

As the morning wore on the darkness increased; a breeze rose up, and the leaves of
the breadfruit trees pattered together with the sound of rain falling upon glass. A
storm was coming, but there was something different in its approach to the approach
of the storms they had already known.

As the breeze increased a sound filled the air, coming from far away beyond the
horizon. It was like the sound of a great multitude of people, and yet so faint and
vague was it that sudden bursts of the breeze through the leaves above would drown it
utterly. Then it ceased, and nothing could be heard but the rocking of the branches
and the tossing of the leaves under the increasing wind, which was now blowing
sharply and fiercely and with a steady rush dead from the west, fretting the lagoon,
and sending clouds and masses of foam right over the reef. The sky that had been so
leaden and peaceful and like a solid roof was now all in a hurry, flowing eastward like
a great turbulent river in spate.

And now, again, one could hear the sound in the distance—the thunder of the
captains of the storm and the shouting; but still so faint, so vague, so indeterminate
and unearthly that it seemed like the sound in a dream.

Emmeline sat amidst the ferns on the floor cowed and dumb, holding the baby to her
breast. It was fast asleep. Dick stood at the doorway. He was disturbed in mind, but he
did not show it.

The whole beautiful island world had now taken on the colour of ashes and the colour
of lead. Beauty had utterly vanished, all seemed sadness and distress.

The cocoa-palms, under the wind that had lost its steady rush and was now blowing in
hurricane blasts, flung themselves about in all the attitudes of distress; and whoever
has seen a tropical storm will know what a cocoa-palm can express by its movements
under the lash of the wind.

Fortunately the house was so placed that it was protected by the whole depth of the
grove between it and the lagoon; and fortunately, too, it was sheltered by the dense
foliage of the breadfruit, for suddenly, with a crash of thunder as if the hammer of
Thor had been flung from sky to earth, the clouds split and the rain came down in a
great slanting wave. It roared on the foliage above, which, bending leaf on leaf, made
a slanting roof from which it rushed in a steady sheet-like cascade.

Dick had darted into the house, and was now sitting beside Emmeline, who was
shivering and holding the child, which had awakened at the sound of the thunder.

For an hour they sat, the rain ceasing and coming again, the thunder shaking earth
and sea, and the wind passing overhead with a piercing, monotonous cry.

Then all at once the wind dropped, the rain ceased, and a pale spectral light, like the
light of dawn, fell before the doorway.

"It's over!" cried Dick, making to get up.

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"Oh, listen!" said Emmeline, clinging to him, and holding the baby to his breast as if
the touch of him would give it protection. She had divined that there was something
approaching worse than a storm.

Then, listening in the silence, away from the other side of the island, they heard a
sound like the droning of a great top.

It was the centre of the cyclone approaching.

A cyclone is a circular storm: a storm in the form of a ring. This ring of hurricane
travels across the ocean with inconceivable speed and fury, yet its centre is a haven of
peace.

As they listened the sound increased, sharpened, and became a tang that pierced the
ear-drums: a sound that shook with hurry and speed, increasing, bringing with it the
bursting and crashing of trees, and breaking at last overhead in a yell that stunned the
brain like the blow of a bludgeon. In a second the house was torn away, and they were
clinging to the roots of the breadfruit, deaf, blinded, half-lifeless.

The terror and the prolonged shock of it reduced them from thinking beings to the
level of frightened animals whose one instinct is preservation.

How long the horror lasted they could not tell, when, like a madman who pauses for a
moment in the midst of his struggles and stands stock-still, the wind ceased blowing,
and there was peace. The centre of the cyclone was passing over the island.

Looking up, one saw a marvellous sight. The air was full of birds, butterflies,
insects—all hanging in the heart of the storm and travelling with it under its
protection.

Though the air was still as the air of a summer's day, from north, south, east, and
west, from every point of the compass, came the yell of the hurricane.

There was something shocking in this.

In a storm one is so beaten about by the wind that one has no time to think: one is half
stupefied. But in the dead centre of a cyclone one is in perfect peace. The trouble is all
around, but it is not here. One has time to examine the thing like a tiger in a cage,
listen to its voice and shudder at its ferocity.

The girl, holding the baby to her breast, sat up gasping. The baby had come to no
harm; it had cried at first when the thunder broke, but now it seemed impassive,
almost dazed. Dick stepped from under the tree and looked at the prodigy in the air.

The cyclone had gathered on its way sea-birds and birds from the land; there were
gulls, electric white and black man-of-war birds, butterflies, and they all seemed
imprisoned under a great drifting dome of glass. As they went, travelling like things
without volition and in a dream, with a hum and a roar the south-west quadrant of the
cyclone burst on the island, and the whole bitter business began over again.
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It lasted for hours, then towards midnight the wind fell; and when the sun rose next
morning he came through a cloudless sky, without a trace of apology for the
destruction caused by his children the winds. He showed trees uprooted and birds
lying dead, three or four canes remaining of what had once been a house, the lagoon
the colour of a pale sapphire, and a glass-green, foam-capped sea racing in thunder
against the reef.

CHAPTER XVII

THE STRICKEN WOODS

At first they thought they were ruined; then Dick, searching, found the old saw under
a tree, and the butcher's knife near it, as though the knife and saw had been trying to
escape in company and had failed.

Bit by bit they began to recover something of their scattered property. The remains of
the flannel had been taken by the cyclone and wrapped round and round a slender
cocoa-nut tree, till the trunk looked like a gaily bandaged leg. The box of fish-hooks
had been jammed into the centre of a cooked breadfruit, both having been picked up
by the fingers of the wind and hurled against the same tree; and the stay-sail of the
Shenandoah was out on the reef, with a piece of coral carefully placed on it as if to
keep it down. As for the lug-sail belonging to the dinghy, it was never seen again.

There is humour sometimes in a cyclone, if you can only appreciate it; no other form of
air disturbance produces such quaint effects. Beside the great main whirlpool of wind,
there are subsidiary whirlpools, each actuated by its own special imp.

Emmeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by these little
ferocious gimlet winds; and that the whole business of the great storm was set about
with the object of snatching Hannah from her, and blowing him out to sea, was a belief
which she held, perhaps, in the innermost recesses of her mind.

The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed, had it not heeled over and sunk in
shallow water at the first onset of the wind; as it was, Dick was able to bail it out at
the next low tide, when it floated as bravely as ever, not having started a single seam.

But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woods as a mass, one
noticed gaps here and there, but what had really happened could not be seen till one
was amongst the trees. Great, beautiful cocoa-nut palms, not dead, but just dying, lay
crushed and broken as if trampled upon by some enormous foot. You would come
across half a dozen lianas twisted into one great cable. Where cocoa-nut palms were,
you could not move a yard without kicking against a fallen nut; you might have picked
up full-grown, half-grown, and wee baby nuts, not bigger than small apples, for on the
same tree you will find nuts of all sizes and conditions.

One never sees a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all have an inclination
from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is why a cyclone has more effect on
them than on other trees.
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Artus, once so pretty a picture with their diamond-chequered trunks, lay broken and
ruined; and right through the belt of mammee apple, right through the bad lands, lay a
broad road, as if an army, horse, foot, and artillery, had passed that way from lagoon
edge to lagoon edge. This was the path left by the great fore-foot of the storm; but had
you searched the woods on either side, you would have found paths where the lesser
winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds had been at play.

From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, rose a perfume of
blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, of lianas twisted and broken and
oozing their sap; the perfume of newly-wrecked and ruined trees—the essence
and soul of the artu, the banyan and cocoa-palm cast upon the wind.

You would have found dead butterflies in the woods, dead birds too; but in the great
path of the storm you would have found dead butterflies' wings, feathers, leaves
frayed as if by fingers, branches of the aoa, and sticks of the hibiscus broken into little
fragments.

Powerful enough to rip a ship open, root up a tree, half ruin a city. Delicate enough to
tear a butterfly wing from wing—that is a cyclone.

Emmeline, wandering about in the woods with Dick on the day after the storm, looking
at the ruin of great tree and little bird, and recollecting the land birds she had caught
a glimpse of yesterday being carried along safely by the storm out to sea to be
drowned, felt a great weight lifting from her heart. Mischance had come, and spared
them and the baby. The blue had spoken, but had not called them.

She felt that something—the something which we in civilisation call

Fate—was for the present gorged; and, without being annihilated, her
incessant hypochondriacal dread condensed itself into a point, leaving her horizon
sunlit and clear.

The cyclone had indeed treated them almost, one might say, amiably. It had taken the
house but that was a small matter, for it had left them nearly all their small
possessions. The tinder box and flint and steel would have been a much more serious
loss than a dozen houses, for, without it, they would have had absolutely no means of
making a fire.

If anything, the cyclone had been almost too kind to them; had let them pay off too
little of that mysterious debt they owed to the gods.

CHAPTER XVIII

A FALLEN IDOL
The next day Dick began to rebuild the house. He had fetched the stay-sail from the
reef and rigged up a temporary tent.

It was a great business cutting the canes and dragging them out in the open.
Emmeline helped; whilst Hannah, seated on the grass, played with the bird that had
vanished during the storm, but reappeared the evening after.
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The child and the bird had grown fast friends; they were friendly enough even at first,
but now the bird would sometimes let the tiny hands clasp him right round his
body—at least, as far as the hands would go.

It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling and unfrightened
bird in his hands; next to pressing a woman in his arms, it is the pleasantest tactile
sensation he will ever experience, perhaps, in life. He will feel a desire to press it to
his heart, if he has such a thing.

Hannah would press Koko to his little brown stomach, as if in artless admission of
where his heart lay.

He was an extraordinarily bright and intelligent child. He did not promise to be

talkative, for, having achieved the word "Dick," he rested content for a long while
before advancing further into the labyrinth of language; but though he did not use his
tongue, he spoke in a host of other ways. With his eyes, that were as bright as Koko's,
and full of all sorts of mischief; with his hands and feet and the movements of his
body. He had a way of shaking his hands before him when highly delighted, a way of
expressing nearly all the shades of pleasure; and though he rarely expressed anger,
when he did so, he expressed it fully.

He was just now passing over the frontier into toyland. In civilisation he would no
doubt have been the possessor of an india-rubber dog or a woolly lamb, but there were
no toys here at all. Emmeline's old doll had been left behind when they took flight
from the other side of the island, and Dick, a year or so ago, on one of his expeditions,
had found it lying half buried in the sand of the beach.

He had brought it back now more as a curiosity than anything else, and they had kept
it on the shelf in the house. The cyclone had impaled it on a tree-twig near by, if in
derision; and Hannah, when it was presented to him as a plaything, flung it away from
him as if in disgust. But he would play with flowers or bright shells, or bits of coral,
making vague patterns with them on the sward.

All the toy lambs in the world would not have pleased him better than those things,
the toys of the Troglodyte children—the children of the Stone Age. To clap two
oyster shells together and make a noise—what, after all, could a baby want
better than that?

One afternoon, when the house was beginning to take some sort of form, they ceased
work and went off into the woods; Emmeline carrying the baby and Dick taking turns
with him. They were going to the valley of the idol.

Since the coming of Hannah, and even before, the stone figure standing in its awful
and mysterious solitude had ceased to be an object of dread to Emmeline, and had
become a thing vaguely benevolent. Love had come to her under its shade; and under
its shade the spirit of the child had entered into her from where, who knows? But
certainly through heaven.

Perhaps the thing which had been the god of some unknown people had inspired her
with the instinct of religion; if so, she was his last worshipper on earth, for when they
entered the valley they found him lying upon his face. Great blocks of stone lay around
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him: there had evidently been a landslip, a catastrophe preparing for ages, and
determined, perhaps, by the torrential rain of the cyclone.

In Ponape, Huahine, in Easter Island, you may see great idols that have been felled
like this, temples slowly dissolving from sight, and terraces, seemingly as solid as the
hills, turning softly and subtly into shapeless mounds of stone.

CHAPTER XIX

THE EXPEDITION
Next morning the light of day filtering through the trees awakened Emmeline in the
tent which they had improvised whilst the house was building. Dawn came later here
than on the other side of the island which faced east later, and in a different manner
for there is the difference of worlds between dawn coming over a wooded hill, and
dawn coming over the sea.

Over at the other side, sitting on the sand with the break of the reef which faced the
east before you, scarcely would the east change colour before the sea-line would be on
fire, the sky lit up into an illimitable void of blue, and the sunlight flooding into the
lagoon, the ripples of light seeming to chase the ripples of water.

On this side it was different. The sky would be dark and full of stars, and the woods,
great spaces of velvety shadow. Then through the leaves of the artu would come a
sigh, and the leaves of the breadfruit would patter, and the sound of the reef become
faint. The land breeze had awakened, and in a while, as if it had blown them away,
looking up, you would find the stars gone, and the sky a veil of palest blue. In this
indirect approach of dawn there was something ineffably mysterious. One could see,
but the things seen were indecisive and vague, just as they are in the gloaming of an
English summer's day.

Scarcely had Emmeline arisen when Dick woke also, and they went out on to the
sward, and then down to the water's edge. Dick went in for a swim, and the girl,
holding the baby, stood on the bank watching him.

Always after a great storm the weather of the island would become more bracing and
exhilarating, and this morning the air seemed filled with the spirit of spring. Emmeline
felt it, and as she watched the swimmer disporting in the water, she laughed, and held
the child up to watch him. She was fey. The breeze, filled with all sorts of sweet
perfumes from the woods, blew her black hair about her shoulders, and the full light
of morning coming over the palm fronds of the woods beyond the sward touched her
and the child. Nature seemed caressing them.

Dick came ashore, and then ran about to dry himself in the wind. Then he went to the
dinghy and examined her; for he had determined to leave the house-building for half a
day, and row round to the old place to see how the banana trees had fared during the
storm. His anxiety about them was not to be wondered at. The island was his larder,
and the bananas were a most valuable article of food. He had all the feelings of a
careful housekeeper about them, and he could not rest till he had seen for himself the
extent of damage, if damage there was any.
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He examined the boat, and then they all went back to breakfast. Living their lives,
they had to use forethought. They would put away, for instance, all the shells of the
cocoa-nuts they used for fuel; and you never could imagine the blazing splendour
there lives in the shell of a cocoa-nut till you see it burning. Yesterday, Dick, with his
usual prudence, had placed a heap of sticks, all wet with the rain of the storm, to dry
in the sun: as a consequence, they had plenty of fuel to make a fire with this morning.

When they had finished breakfast he got the knife to cut the bananas with if there
were any left to cut and, taking the javelin, he went down to the boat, followed by
Emmeline and the child.

Dick had stepped into the boat, and was on the point of unmooring her, and pushing
her off, when Emmeline stopped him.

"Dick!"

"Yes?"

"I will go with you."

"You!" said he in astonishment.

"Yes, I'm—not afraid any more."

It was a fact; since the coming of the child she had lost that dread of the other side of
the island or almost lost it.

Death is a great darkness, birth is a great light—they had intermixed in her

mind; the darkness was still there, but it was no longer terrible to her, for it was
infused with the light. The result was a twilight sad, but beautiful, and unpeopled with
forms of fear.

Years ago she had seen a mysterious door close and shut a human being out for ever
from the world. The sight had filled her with dread unimaginable, for she had no
words for the thing, no religion or philosophy to explain it away or gloss it over. Just
recently she had seen an equally mysterious door open and admit a human being; and
deep down in her mind, in the place where the dreams were, the one great fact had
explained and justified the other. Life had vanished into the void, but life had come
from there. There was life in the void, and it was no longer terrible.

Perhaps all religions were born on a day when some woman, seated upon a rock by
the prehistoric sea, looked at her newborn child and recalled to mind her man who
had been slain, thus closing the charm and imprisoning the idea of a future state.

Emmeline, with the child in her arms, stepped into the little boat and took her seat in
the stern, whilst Dick pushed off. Scarcely had he put out the sculls than a new
passenger arrived. It was Koko. He would often accompany them to the reef, though,
strangely enough, he would never go there alone of his own accord. He made a circle
or two over them, and then lit on the gunwale in the bow, and perched there, humped
up, and with his long dove-coloured tail feathers presented to the water.
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The oarsman kept close in-shore, and as they rounded the little cape all gay with wild
cocoa-nut the bushes brushed the boat, and the child, excited by their colour, held out
his hands to them. Emmeline stretched out her hand and broke off a branch; but it
was not a branch of the wild cocoa-nut she had plucked, it was a branch of the
never-wake-up berries. The berries that will cause a man to sleep, should he eat of
them—to sleep and dream, and never wake up again.

"Throw them away!" cried Dick, who remembered.

"I will in a minute," she replied.

She was holding them up before the child, who was laughing and trying to grasp them.
Then she forgot them, and dropped them in the bottom of the boat, for something had
struck the keel with a thud, and the water was boiling all round.

There was a savage fight going on below. In the breeding season great battles would
take place sometimes in the lagoon, for fish have their jealousies just like
men—love affairs, friendships. The two great forms could be dimly perceived,
one in pursuit of the other, and they terrified Emmeline, who implored Dick to row on.

They slipped by the pleasant shores that Emmeline had never seen before, having
been sound asleep when they came past them those years ago.

Just before putting off she had looked back at the beginnings of the little house under
the artu tree, and as she looked at the strange glades and groves, the picture of it rose
before her, and seemed to call her back.

It was a tiny possession, but it was home; and so little used to change was she that
already a sort of home-sickness was upon her; but it passed away almost as soon as it
came, and she fell to wondering at the things around her, and pointing them out to the
child.

When they came to the place where Dick had hooked the albicore, he hung on his oars
and told her about it. It was the first time she had heard of it; a fact which shows into
what a state of savagery he had been lapsing. He had mentioned about the canoes, for
he had to account for the javelin; but as for telling her of the incidents of the chase, he
no more thought of doing so than a red Indian would think of detailing to his squaw
the incidents of a bear hunt. Contempt for women is the first law of savagery, and
perhaps the last law of some old and profound philosophy.

She listened, and when it came to the incident of the shark, she shuddered.

"I wish I had a hook big enough to catch him with," said he, staring into the water as if
in search of his enemy.

"Don't think of him, Dick," said Emmeline, holding the child more tightly to her heart.
"Row on."

He resumed the sculls, but you could have seen from his face that he was recounting
to himself the incident.
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When they had rounded the last promontory, and the strand and the break in the reef
opened before them, Emmeline caught her breath. The place had changed in some
subtle manner; everything was there as before, yet everything seemed
different—the lagoon seemed narrower, the reef nearer, the cocoa-palms not
nearly so tall. She was contrasting the real things with the recollection of them when
seen by a child. The black speck had vanished from the reef; the storm had swept it
utterly away.

Dick beached the boat on the shelving sand, and left Emmeline seated in the stern of
it, whilst he went in search of the bananas; she would have accompanied him, but the
child had fallen asleep.

Hannah asleep was even a pleasanter picture than when awake. He looked like a little
brown Cupid without wings, bow or arrow. He had all the grace of a curled-up feather.
Sleep was always in pursuit of him, and would catch him up at the most unexpected
moments—when he was at play, or indeed at any time. Emmeline would
sometimes find him with a coloured shell or bit of coral that he had been playing with
in his hand fast asleep, a happy expression on his face, as if his mind were pursuing its
earthly avocations on some fortunate beach in dreamland.

Dick had plucked a huge breadfruit leaf and given it to her as a shelter from the sun,
and she sat holding it over her, and gazing straight before her, over the white, sunlit
sands.

The flight of the mind in reverie is not in a direct line. To her, dreaming as she sat,
came all sorts of coloured pictures, recalled by the scene before her: the green water
under the stern of a ship, and the word Shenandoah vaguely reflected on it; their
landing, and the little tea-set spread out on the white sand—she could still see
the pansies painted on the plates, and she counted in memory the lead spoons; the
great stars that burned over the reef at nights; the Cluricaunes and fairies; the cask by
the well where the convolvulus blossomed, and the wind-blown trees seen from the
summit of the hill—all these pictures drifted before her, dissolving and
replacing each other as they went.

There was sadness in the contemplation of them, but pleasure too. She felt at peace
with the world. All trouble seemed far behind her. It was as if the great storm that had
left them unharmed had been an ambassador from the powers above to assure her of
their forbearance, protection, and love.

All at once she noticed that between the boat's bow and the sand there lay a broad,
blue, sparkling line. The dinghy was afloat.

CHAPTER XX

THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON

The woods here had been less affected by the cyclone than those upon the other side
of the island, but there had been destruction enough. To reach the place he wanted,
Dick had to climb over felled trees and fight his way through a tangle of vines that had
once hung overhead.
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The banana trees had not suffered at all; as if by some special dispensation of
Providence even the great bunches of fruit had been scarcely injured, and he
proceeded to climb and cut them. He cut two bunches, and with one across his
shoulder came back down through the trees.

He had got half across the sands, his head bent under the load, when a distant call
came to him, and, raising his head, he saw the boat adrift in the middle of the lagoon,
and the figure of the girl in the bow of it waving to him with her arm. He saw a scull
floating on the water half-way between the boat and the shore, which she had no
doubt lost in an attempt to paddle the boat back. He remembered that the tide was
going out.

He flung his load aside, and ran down the beach; in a moment he was in the water.
Emmeline, standing up in the boat, watched him.

When she found herself adrift, she had made an effort to row back, and in her hurry
shipping the sculls she had lost one. With a single scull she was quite helpless, as she
had not the art of sculling a boat from the stern. At first she was not frightened,
because she knew that Dick would soon return to her assistance; but as the distance
between boat and shore increased, a cold hand seemed laid upon her heart. Looking
at the shore it seemed very far away, and the view towards the reef was terrific, for
the opening had increased in apparent size, and the great sea beyond seemed drawing
her to it.

She saw Dick coming out of the wood with the load on his shoulder, and she called to
him. At first he did not seem to hear, then she saw him look up, cast the bananas
away, and come running down the sand to the water's edge. She watched him
swimming, she saw him seize the scull, and her heart gave a great leap of joy.

Towing the scull and swimming with one arm, he rapidly approached the boat. He was
quite close, only ten feet away, when Emmeline saw behind him, shearing through the
clear rippling water, and advancing with speed, a dark triangle that seemed made of
canvas stretched upon a sword-point.

Forty years ago he had floated adrift on the sea in the form and likeness of a small
shabby pine-cone, a prey to anything that might find him. He had escaped the jaws of
the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very wide door; he had escaped the
albicore and squid: his life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death.
Out of a billion like him born in the same year, he and a few others only had survived.

For thirty years he had kept the lagoon to himself, as a ferocious tiger keeps a jungle.
He had known the palm tree on the reef when it was a seedling, and he had known the
reef even before the palm tree was there. The things he had devoured, flung one upon
another, would have made a mountain; yet he was as clear of enmity as a sword, as
cruel and as soulless. He was the spirit of the lagoon.

Emmeline screamed, and pointed to the thing behind the swimmer. He turned, saw it,
dropped the oar and made for the boat. She had seized the remaining scull and stood
with it poised, then she hurled it blade foremost at the form in the water, now fully
visible, and close on its prey.
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She could not throw a stone straight, yet the scull went like an arrow to the mark,
balking the pursuer and saving the pursued. In a moment more his leg was over the
gunwale, and he was saved.

But the scull was lost.

CHAPTER XXI

THE HAND OF THE SEA

There was nothing in the boat that could possibly be used as a paddle; the scull was
only five or six yards away, but to attempt to swim to it was certain death, yet they
were being swept out to sea. He might have made the attempt, only that on the
starboard quarter the form of the shark, gently swimming at the same pace as they
were drifting, could be made out only half veiled by the water.

The bird perched on the gunwale seemed to divine their trouble, for he rose in the air,
made a circle, and resumed his perch with all his feathers ruffled.

Dick stood in despair, helpless, his hands clasping his head. The shore was drawing
away before him, the surf loudening behind him, yet he could do nothing. The island
was being taken away from them by the great hand of the sea.

Then, suddenly, the little boat entered the race formed by the confluence of the tides,
from the right and left arms of the lagoon; the sound of the surf suddenly increased as
though a door had been flung open. The breakers were falling and the sea-gulls crying
on either side of them, and for a moment the ocean seemed to hesitate as to whether
they were to be taken away into her wastes, or dashed on the coral strand. Only for a
moment this seeming hesitation lasted; then the power of the tide prevailed over the
power of the swell, and the little boat taken by the current drifted gently out to sea.

Dick flung himself down beside Emmeline, who was seated in the bottom of the boat
holding the child to her breast. The bird, seeing the land retreat, and wise in its
instinct, rose into the air. It circled thrice round the drifting boat, and then, like a
beautiful but faithless spirit, passed away to the shore.

CHAPTER XXII

TOGETHER
The island had sunk slowly from sight; at sundown it was just a trace, a stain on the
south-western horizon. It was before the new moon, and the little boat lay drifting. It
drifted from the light of sunset into a world of vague violet twilight, and now it lay
drifting under the stars.

The girl, clasping the baby to her breast, leaned against her companion's shoulder;
neither of them spoke. All the wonders in their short existence had culminated in this
final wonder, this passing away together from the world of Time. This strange voyage
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they had embarked on—to where?

Now that the first terror was over they felt neither sorrow nor fear. They were
together. Come what might, nothing could divide them; even should they sleep and
never wake up, they would sleep together. Had one been left and the other taken!

As though the thought had occurred to them simultaneously, they turned one to the
other, and their lips met, their souls met, mingling in one dream; whilst above in the
windless heaven space answered space with flashes of siderial light, and Canopus
shone and burned like the pointed sword of Azrael.

Clasped in Emmeline's hand was the last and most mysterious gift of the mysterious
world they had known—the branch of crimson berries.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

MAD LESTRANGE
They knew him upon the Pacific slope as "Mad Lestrange." He was not mad, but he
was a man with a fixed idea. He was pursued by a vision: the vision of two children
and an old sailor adrift in a little boat upon a wide blue sea.

When the Arago, bound for Papetee, picked up the boats of the Northumberland, only
the people in the long-boat were alive. Le Farge, the captain, was mad, and he never
recovered his reason. Lestrange was utterly shattered; the awful experience in the
boats and the loss of the children had left him a seemingly helpless wreck. The
scowbankers, like all their class, had fared better, and in a few days were about the
ship and sitting in the sun. Four days after the rescue the Arago spoke the Newcastle,
bound for San Francisco, and transshipped the shipwrecked men.

Had a physician seen Lestrange on board the Northumberland as she lay in that long,
long calm before the fire, he would have declared that nothing but a miracle could
prolong his life. The miracle came about.

In the general hospital of San Francisco, as the clouds cleared from his mind, they
unveiled the picture of the children and the little boat. The picture had been there
daily, seen but not truly comprehended; the horrors gone through in the open boat,
the sheer physical exhaustion, had merged all the accidents of the great disaster into
one mournful half-comprehended fact. When his brain cleared all the other incidents
fell out of focus, and memory, with her eyes set upon the children, began to paint a
picture that he was ever more to see.

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her
pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but
the world of an artist. All that is inessential she casts away, all that is essential she
retains; she idealises, and that is why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to
keep a man a celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart
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with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also a poet.

The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almost diabolical poetry,
for in it the little boat and her helpless crew were represented adrift on a blue and
sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful to look at, yet most terrible, bearing as it did the
recollections of thirst.

He had been dying, when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, he looked at this
picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserted itself, and he refused to die.

The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to reject death. He was not in
the least conscious of the exercise of this power; he only knew that a great and
absorbing interest had suddenly arisen in him, and that a great aim stood before
him—the recovery of the children.

The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was slain in its turn by
the increased vitality against which it had to strive. He left the hospital and took up
his quarters at the Palace Hotel, and then, like the General of an army, he began to
formulate his plan of campaign against Fate.

When the crew of the Northumberland had stampeded, hurling their officers aside,
lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselves into the sea, everything had
been lost in the way of ship's papers; the charts, the two logs—everything, in
fact, that could indicate the latitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second
officers and a midshipman had shared the fate of the quarter-boat; of the fore-mast
hands saved, not one, of course, could give the slightest hint as to the locality of the
spot.

A time reckoning from the Horn told little, for there was no record of the log. All that
could be said was that the disaster had occurred somewhere south of the line.

In Le Farge's brain lay for a certainty the position, and Lestrange went to see the
captain in the "Maison de Sante," where he was being looked after, and found him
quite recovered from the furious mania that he had been suffering from. Quite
recovered, and playing with a ball of coloured worsted.

There remained the log of the Arago; in it would be found the latitude and longitude of
the boats she had picked up.

The Arago, due at Papetee, became overdue. Lestrange watched the overdue lists
from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, uselessly, for the Arago
never was heard of again. One could not affirm even that she was wrecked; she was
simply one of the ships that never come back from the sea.

CHAPTER II
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THE SECRET OF THE AZURE
To lose a child he loves is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that can happen to a
man. I do not refer to its death.

A child wanders into the street, or is left by its nurse for a moment, and vanishes. At
first the thing is not realised. There is a pang and hurry at the heart which half
vanishes, whilst the understanding explains that in a civilised city, if a child gets lost,
it will be found and brought back by the neighbours or the police.

But the police know nothing of the matter, or the neighbours, and the hours pass. Any
minute may bring back the wanderer; but the minutes pass, and the day wears into
evening, and the evening to night, and the night to dawn, and the common sounds of a
new day begin.

You cannot remain at home for restlessness; you go out, only to return hurriedly for
news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear shocks you; the common sounds
of life, the roll of the carts and cabs in the street, the footsteps of the passers-by, are
full of an indescribable mournfulness; music increases your misery into madness, and
the joy of others is monstrous as laughter heard in hell.

If someone were to bring you the dead body of the child, you might weep, but you
would bless him, for it is the uncertainty that kills.

You go mad, or go on living. Years pass by, and you are an old man. You say to
yourself: "He would have been twenty years of age to-day."

There is not in the old ferocious penal code of our forefathers a punishment adequate
to the case of the man or woman who steals a child.

Lestrange was a wealthy man, and one hope remained to him, that the children might
have been rescued by some passing ship. It was not the case of children lost in a city,
but in the broad Pacific, where ships travel from all ports to all ports, and to advertise
his loss adequately it was necessary to placard the world. Ten thousand dollars was
the reward offered for news of the lost ones, twenty thousand for the recovery; and
the advertisement appeared in every newspaper likely to reach the eyes of a sailor,
from the Liverpool Post to the Dead Bird.

The years passed without anything definite coming in answer to all these
advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the sea in the
neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, but they were not the
children he was seeking for. This incident at once depressed and stimulated him, for it
seemed to say, "If these children have been saved, why not yours?"

The strange thing was, that in his heart he felt a certainty that they were alive. His
intellect suggested their death in twenty different forms; but a whisper, somewhere
out of that great blue ocean, told him at intervals that what he sought was there,
living, and waiting for him.

He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline—a dreamer, with a

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mind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this world flowing from
intellect to intellect, and even from what we call inanimate things. A coarser nature
would, though feeling, perhaps, as acutely the grief, have given up in despair the
search. But he kept on; and at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he
chartered a schooner and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at
little-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only three hundred miles away
from the tiny island of this story.

If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not look at a map of
the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square leagues of
sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls.

Up to a few years ago there were many small islands utterly unknown; even still there
are some, though the charts of the Pacific are the greatest triumphs of hydrography;
and though the island of the story was actually on the Admiralty charts, of what use
was that fact to Lestrange?

He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolation of the sea
had touched him.

In that eighteen months the Pacific explained itself to him in part, explained its
vastness, its secrecy and inviolability. The schooner lifted veil upon veil of distance,
and veil upon veil lay beyond. He could only move in a right line; to search the
wilderness of water with any hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of
moving in all directions at once.

He would often lean over the bulwark rail and watch the swell slip by, as if
questioning the water. Then the sunsets began to weigh upon his heart, and the stars
to speak to him in a new language, and he knew that it was time to return, if he would
return with a whole mind.

When he got back to San Francisco he called upon his agent, Wannamaker of Kearney
Street, but there was still no news.

CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN
He had a suite of rooms at the Palace Hotel, and he lived the life of any other rich man
who is not addicted to pleasure. He knew some of the best people in the city, and
conducted himself so sanely in all respects that a casual stranger would never have
guessed his reputation for madness; but when you knew him better, you would find
sometimes in the middle of a conversation that his mind was away from the subject;
and were you to follow him in the street, you would hear him in conversation with
himself. Once at a dinner-party he rose and left the room, and did not return. Trifles,
but sufficient to establish a reputation of a sort.

One morning—to be precise, it was the second day of May, exactly eight years
and five months after the wreck of the Northumberland—Lestrange was in his
sitting-room reading, when the bell of the telephone, which stood in the corner of the
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room, rang. He went to the instrument.

"Are you there?" came a high American voice. "Lestrange—right—come

down and see me—Wannamaker—I have news for you."

Lestrange held the receiver for a moment, then he put it back in the rest. He went to a
chair and sat down, holding his head between his hands, then he rose and went to the
telephone again; but he dared not use it, he dare not shatter the newborn hope.

"News!" What a world lies in that word.

In Kearney Street he stood before the door of Wannamaker's office collecting himself
and watching the crowd drifting by, then he entered and went up the stairs. He
pushed open a swing-door and entered a great room. The clink and rattle of a dozen
typewriters filled the place, and all the hurry of business; clerks passed and came with
sheaves of correspondence in their hands; and Wannamaker himself, rising from
bending over a message which he was correcting on one of the typewriters' tables,
saw the newcomer and led him to the private office.

"What is it?" said Lestrange.

"Only this," said the other, taking up a slip of paper with a name and address on it.
"Simon J. Fountain, of 45 Rathray Street, West—that's down near the
wharves—says he has seen your ad. in an old number of a paper, and he thinks
he can tell you something. He did not specify the nature of the intelligence, but it
might be worth finding out.

"I will go there," said Lestrange.

"Do you know Rathray Street?"

"No."

Wannamaker went out and called a boy and gave him some directions; then Lestrange
and the boy started.

Lestrange left the office without saying "Thank you," or taking leave in any way of the
advertising agent who did not feel in the least affronted, for he knew his customer.

Rathray Street is, or was before the earthquake, a street of small clean houses. It had
a seafaring look that was accentuated by the marine perfumes from the wharves close
by and the sound of steam winches loading or discharging cargo—a sound that
ceased not a night or day as the work went on beneath the sun or the sizzling arc
lamps.

No. 45 was almost exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse; and the door was
opened by a neat, prim woman, small, and of middle age. Commonplace she was, no
doubt, but not commonplace to Lestrange.

"Is Mr Fountain in?" he asked. "I have come about the advertisement."
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"Oh, have you, sir?" she replied, making way for him to enter, and showing him into a
little sitting-room on the left of the passage. "The Captain is in bed; he is a great
invalid, but he was expecting, perhaps, someone would call, and he will be able to see
you in a minute, if you don't mind waiting."

"Thanks," said Lestrange; "I can wait."

He had waited eight years, what mattered a few minutes now? But at no time in the
eight years had he suffered such suspense, for his heart knew that now, just now in
this commonplace little house, from the lips of, perhaps, the husband of that
commonplace woman, he was going to learn either what he feared to hear, or what he
hoped.

It was a depressing little room; it was so clean, and looked as though it were never
used. A ship imprisoned in a glass bottle stood upon the mantelpiece, and there were
shells from far-away places, pictures of ships in sand—all the things one finds
as a rule adorning an old sailor's home.

Lestrange, as he sat waiting, could hear movements from the next

room—probably the invalid's, which they were preparing for his reception. The
distant sounds of the derricks and winches came muted through the tightly shut
window that looked as though it never had been opened. A square of sunlight lit the
upper part of the cheap lace curtain on the right of the window, and repeated its
pattern vaguely on the lower part of the wall opposite. Then a bluebottle fly awoke
suddenly into life and began to buzz and drum against the window pane, and
Lestrange wished that they would come.

A man of his temperament must necessarily, even under the happiest circumstances,
suffer in going through the world; the fine fibre always suffers when brought into
contact with the coarse. These people were as kindly disposed as anyone else. The
advertisement and the face and manners of the visitor might have told them that it
was not the time for delay, yet they kept him waiting whilst they arranged bed-quilts
and put medicine bottles straight as if he could see!

At last the door opened, and the woman said:

"Will you step this way, sir?"

She showed him into a bedroom opening off the passage. The room was neat and
clean, and had that indescribable appearance which marks the bedroom of the invalid.

In the bed, making a mountain under the counterpane with an enormously distended
stomach, lay a man, black-bearded, and with his large, capable, useless hands spread
out on the coverlet—hands ready and willing, but debarred from work. Without
moving his body, he turned his head slowly and looked at the newcomer. This slow
movement was not from weakness or disease, it was the slow, emotionless nature of
the man speaking.

"This is the gentleman, Silas," said the woman, speaking over Lestrange's shoulder.
Then she withdrew and closed the door.
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"Take a chair, sir," said the sea captain, flapping one of his hands on the counterpane
as if in wearied protest against his own helplessness. "I haven't the pleasure of your
name, but the missus tells me you're come about the advertisement I lit on
yester-even."

He took a paper, folded small, that lay beside him, and held it out to his visitor. It was
a Sidney Bulletin three years old.

"Yes," said Lestrange, looking at the paper; "that is my advertisement."

"Well, it's strange—very strange," said Captain Fountain, "that I should have lit
on it only yesterday. I've had it all three years in my chest, the way old papers get
lying at the bottom with odds and ends. Mightn't a' seen it now, only the missus
cleared the raffle out of the chest, and, `Give me that paper,' I says, seeing it in her
hand; and I fell to reading it, for a man'll read anything bar tracts lying in bed eight
months, as I've been with the dropsy. I've been whaler man and boy forty year, and my
last ship was the Sea-Horse. Over seven years ago one of my men picked up something
on a beach of one of them islands east of the Marquesas—we'd put in to water."

"Yes, yes," said Lestrange. "What was it he found?"

"Missus!" roared the captain in a voice that shook the walls of the room.

The door opened, and the woman appeared.

"Fetch me my keys out of my trousers pocket."

The trousers were hanging up on the back of the door, as if only waiting to be put on.
The woman fetched the keys, and he fumbled over them and found one. He handed it
to her, and pointed to the drawer of a bureau opposite the bed.

She knew evidently what was wanted, for she opened the drawer and produced a box,
which she handed to him. It was a small cardboard box tied round with a bit of string.
He undid the string, and disclosed a child's tea service: a teapot, cream jug, six little
plates all painted with a pansy.

It was the box which Emmeline had always been losing—lost again.

Lestrange buried his face in his hands. He knew the things. Emmeline had shown
them to him in a burst of confidence. Out of all that vast ocean he had searched
unavailingly: they had come to him like a message, and the awe and mystery of it
bowed him down and crushed him.

The captain had placed the things on the newspaper spread out by his side, and he
was unrolling the little spoons from their tissue-paper covering. He counted them as if
entering up the tale of some trust, and placed them on the newspaper.

"When did you find them?" asked Lestrange, speaking with his face still covered.

"A matter of over seven years ago," replied the captain, "we'd put in to water at a
place south of the line—Palm Tree Island we whalemen call it, because of the
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tree at the break of the lagoon. One of my men brought it aboard, found it in a shanty
built of sugarcanes which the men bust up for devilment."

"Good God!" said Lestrange. "Was there no one there—nothing but this box?"

"Not a sight or sound, so the men said; just the shanty, abandoned seemingly. I had no
time to land and hunt for castaways, I was after whales."

"How big is the island?"

"Oh, a fairish middle-sized island—no natives. I've heard tell it's tabu; why, the
Lord only knows—some crank of the Kanakas I s'pose. Anyhow, there's the
findings—you recognise them?"

"I do."

"Seems strange," said the captain, "that I should pick em up; seems strange your
advertisement out, and the answer to it lying amongst my gear, but that's the way
things go."

"Strange!" said the other. "It's more than strange."

"Of course," continued the captain, "they might have been on the island hid away
som'ere, there's no saying; only appearances are against it. Of course they might be
there now unbeknownst to you or me."

"They are there now," answered Lestrange, who was sitting up and looking at the
playthings as though he read in them some hidden message. "They are there now.
Have you the position of the island?"

"I have. Missus, hand me my private log."

She took a bulky, greasy, black note-book from the bureau, and handed it to him. He
opened it, thumbed the pages, and then read out the latitude and longitude.

"I entered it on the day of finding—here's the entry. `Adams brought aboard
child's toy box out of deserted shanty, which men pulled down; traded it to me for a
caulker of rum.' The cruise lasted three years and eight months after that; we'd only
been out three when it happened. I forgot all about it: three years scrubbing round the
world after whales doesn't brighten a man's memory. Right round we went, and paid
off at Nantucket. Then, after a fortni't on shore and a month repairin', the old
Sea-Horse was off again, I with her. It was at Honolulu this dropsy took me, and back I
come here, home. That's the yarn. There's not much to it, but, seein' your
advertisement, I thought I might answer it."

Lestrange took Fountain's hand and shook it.

"You see the reward I offered?" he said. "I have not my cheque book with me, but you
shall have the cheque in an hour from now."
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"No, SIR," replied the captain; "if anything comes of it, I don't say I'm not open to
some small acknowledgment, but ten thousand dollars for a five-cent
box—that's not my way of doing business."

"I can't make you take the money now—I can't even thank you properly now,"
said Lestrange—"I am in a fever; but when all is settled, you and I will settle
this business. My God!"

He buried his face in his hands again.

"I'm not wishing to be inquisitive," said Captain Fountain, slowly putting the things
back in the box and tucking the paper shavings round them, "but may I ask how you
propose to move in this business?"

"I will hire a ship at once and search."

"Ay," said the captain, wrapping up the little spoons in a meditative manner; "perhaps
that will be best."

He felt certain in his own mind that the search would be fruitless, but he did not say
so. If he had been absolutely certain in his mind without being able to produce the
proof, he would not have counselled Lestrange to any other course, knowing that the
man's mind would never be settled until proof positive was produced.

"The question is," said Lestrange, "what is my quickest way to get there?"

"There I may be able to help you," said Fountain tying the string round the box "A
schooner with good heels to her is what you want; and, if I'm not mistaken, there's one
discharging cargo at this present minit at O'Sullivan's wharf. Missus!"

The woman answered the call. Lestrange felt like a person in a dream, and these
people who were interesting themselves in his affairs seemed to him beneficent
beyond the nature of human beings.

"Is Captain Stannistreet home, think you?"

"I don't know," replied the woman; "but I can go see."

"Do."

She went.

"He lives only a few doors down," said Fountain, "and he's the man for you. Best
schooner captain ever sailed out of 'Frisco. The Raratonga is the name of the boat I
have in my mind—best boat that ever wore copper. Stannistreet is captain of
her, owners are M'Vitie. She's been missionary, and she's been pigs; copra was her
last cargo, and she's nearly discharged it. Oh, M'Vitie would hire her out to Satan at a
price; you needn't be afraid of their boggling at it if you can raise the dollars. She's
had a new suit of sails only the beginning of the year. Oh, she'll fix you up to a T, and
you take the word of S. Fountain for that. I'll engineer the thing from this bed if you'll
let me put my oar in your trouble; I'll victual her, and find a crew three quarter price
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of any of those d——d skulking agents. Oh, I'll take a commission right
enough, but I'm half paid with doing the thing."

He ceased, for footsteps sounded in the passage outside, and Captain Stannistreet was
shown in. He was a young man of not more than thirty, alert, quick of eye, and
pleasant of face. Fountain introduced him to Lestrange, who had taken a fancy to him
at first sight.

When he heard about the business in hand, he seemed interested at once; the affair
seemed to appeal to him more than if it had been a purely commercial matter, much
as copra and pigs.

"If you'll come with me, sir, down to the wharf, I'll show you the boat now," he said,
when they had discussed the matter and threshed it out thoroughly.

He rose, bid good-day to his friend Fountain, and Lestrange followed him, carrying the
brown paper box in his hand.

O'Sullivan's Wharf was not far away. A tall Cape Horner that looked almost a twin
sister of the ill-fated Northumberland was discharging iron, and astern of her, graceful
as a dream, with snow-white decks, lay the Raratonga discharging copra.

"That's the boat," said Stannistreet; "cargo nearly all out. How does she strike your
fancy?"

"I'll take her," said Lestrange, "cost what it will."

CHAPTER IV

DUE SOUTH
It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under the supervision of the
bedridden captain, that the Raratonga, with Lestrange on board, cleared the Golden
Gates, and made south, heeling to a ten-knot breeze.

There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In a great ship, if you

have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the sky-high spars, the
finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage of, will form a memory never
to be blotted out.

A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy denied to the
square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same relationship as a young girl to a
dowager; and the Raratonga was not only a schooner, but the queen, acknowledged of
all the schooners in the Pacific.

For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind became baffling and
headed them off.

Added to Lestrange's feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deep and

soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling him that the children he
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sought were threatened by some danger.

These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast, as wind blows
upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days, and then, as if Fate had
relented, up sprang on the starboard quarter a spanking breeze, making the rigging
sing to a merry tune, and blowing the spindrift from the forefoot, as the Raratonga,
heeling to its pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading
behind her like a fan.

It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of a dream. Then it
ceased.

The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a great pale blue
dome; just where it met the water line of the far horizon a delicate tracery of cloud
draped the entire round of the sky.

I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air: to the eye it was so, for the
swell under-running the glitter on its surface was so even, so equable, and so
rhythmical, that the surface seemed not in motion. Occasionally a dimple broke the
surface, and strips of dark sea-weed floated by, showing up the green; dim things rose
to the surface and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from
sight.

Two days, never to be recovered, passed, and still the calm continued. On the morning
of the third day it breezed up from the nor'-nor'west, and they continued their course,
a cloud of canvas, every sail drawing, and the music of the ripple under the forefoot.

Captain Stannistreet was a genius in his profession; he could get more speed out of a
schooner than any other man afloat, and carry more canvas without losing a stick. He
was also, fortunately for Lestrange, a man of refinement and education, and what was
better still, understanding.

They were pacing the deck one afternoon, when Lestrange, who was walking with his
hands behind him, and his eyes counting the brown dowels in the cream-white
planking, broke silence.

"You don't believe in visions and dreams?"

"How do you know that?" replied the other.

"Oh, I only put it as a question; most people say they don't."

"Yes, but most people do."

"I do," said Lestrange.

He was silent for a moment.

"You know my trouble so well that I won't bother you going over it, but there has come
over me of late a feeling—it is like a waking dream."
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"Yes?"

"I can't quite explain, for it is as if I saw something which my intelligence could not
comprehend, or make an image of."

"I think I know what you mean."

"I don't think you do. This is something quite strange. I am fifty, and in fifty years a
man has experienced, as a rule, all the ordinary and most of the extraordinary
sensations that a human being can be subjected to. Well, I have never felt this
sensation before; it comes on only at times. I see, as you might imagine, a young baby
sees, and things are before me that I do not comprehend. It is not through my bodily
eyes that this sensation comes, but through some window of the mind, from before
which a curtain has been drawn."

"That's strange," said Stannistreet, who did not like the conversation over-much, being
simply a schooner captain and a plain man, though intelligent enough and
sympathetic.

"This something tells me," went on Lestrange, "that there is danger threatening
the—" He ceased, paused a minute, and then, to Stannistreet's relief, went on.
"If I talk like that you will think I am not right in my head: let us pass the subject by,
let us forget dreams and omens and come to realities. You know how I lost the
children; you know how I hope to find them at the place where Captain Fountain found
their traces? He says the island was uninhabited, but he was not sure."

"No," replied Stannistreet, "he only spoke of the beach."

"Yes. Well, suppose there were natives at the other side of the island who had taken
these children."

"If so, they would grow up with the natives."

"And become savages?"

"Yes; but the Polynesians can't be really called savages; they are a very decent lot I've
knocked about amongst them a good while, and a kanaka is as white as a white
man—which is not saying much, but it's something. Most of the islands are
civilised now. Of course there are a few that aren't, but still, suppose even that
`savages,' as you call them, had come and taken the children off—"

Lestrange's breath caught, for this was the very fear that was in his heart, though he
had never spoken it.

"Well?"

"Well, they would be well treated."

"And brought up as savages?"

"I suppose so."

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Lestrange sighed.

"Look here," said the captain; "it's all very well talking, but upon my word I think that
we civilised folk put on a lot of airs, and waste a lot of pity on savages."

"How so?"

"What does a man want to be but happy?"

"Yes."

"Well, who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he's happy enough,
and he's not always holding a corroboree. He's a good deal of a gentleman; he has
perfect health; he lives the life a man was born to live—face to face with
Nature. He doesn't see the sun through an office window or the moon through the
smoke of factory chimneys; happy and civilised too but, bless you, where is he? The
whites have driven him out; in one or two small islands you may find him
still—a crumb or so of him."

"Suppose," said Lestrange, "suppose those children had been brought up face to face
with Nature—"

"Yes?"

"Living that free life—"

"Yes?"

"Waking up under the stars"—Lestrange was speaking with his eyes fixed, as if
upon something very far away—"going to sleep as the sun sets, feeling the air
fresh, like this which blows upon us, all around them. Suppose they were like that,
would it not be a cruelty to bring them to what we call civilisation?"

"I think it would," said Stannistreet.

Lestrange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck, his head bowed and his hands
behind his back.

One evening at sunset, Stannistreet said:

"We're two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning from to-day's reckoning
at noon. We're going all ten knots even with this breeze; we ought to fetch the place
this time to-morrow. Before that if it freshens."

"I am greatly disturbed," said Lestrange.

He went below, and the schooner captain shook his head, and, locking his arm round a
ratlin, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craft as she stole along, skirting the
sunset, splendid, and to the nautical eye full of fine weather.
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The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but it had been blowing fairly all the
night, and the Raratonga had made good way. About eleven it began to fail. It became
the lightest sailing breeze, just sufficient to keep the sails drawing, and the wake
rippling and swirling behind. Suddenly Stannistreet, who had been standing talking to
Lestrange, climbed a few feet up the mizzen ratlins, and shaded his eyes.

"What is it?" asked Lestrange.

"A boat," he replied. "Hand me that glass you will find in the sling there."

He levelled the glass, and looked for a long time without speaking.

"It's a boat adrift—a small boat, nothing in her. Stay! I see something white,
can't make it out. Hi there!"—to the fellow at the wheel. "Keep her a point more
to starboard." He got on to the deck. "We're going dead on for her."

"Is there any one in her?" asked Lestrange.

"Can't quite make out, but I'll lower the whale-boat and fetch her alongside."

He gave orders for the whale-boat to be slung out and manned.

As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which looked like a
ship's dinghy, contained something, but what, could not be made out.

When he had approached near enough, Stannistreet put the helm down and brought
the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took his place in the bow of the
whale-boat and Lestrange in the stern. The boat was lowered, the falls cast off, and
the oars bent to the water.

The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely bigger than
a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whaleboat's nose was touching her quarter.
Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.

In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of coloured striped
material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half hidden
by her body, the other clasped partly to herself, partly to her companion, the body of a
baby. They were natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from some
inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl's hand
was a branch of some tree, and on the branch a single withered berry.

"Are they dead?" asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and
who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat trying to see.

"No," said Stannistreet; "they are asleep."

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